Six Challenges Businesses Must Overcome in the Era of Relationship Marketing

Consumer behavior has changed dramatically in recent years. When, what, how, and where they shop has been disrupted on multiple levels.

Loyalty was challenged, as consumers were forced to seek new providers when supply chain or access issues kept them from their preferred brands during the pandemic, and things haven’t been the same since. This combination of changing behavior, a rapidly evolving marketing technology landscape, and the challenging economy have created a perfect storm that most marketers continue to deal with today.

Winning a customer’s business today means winning their heart first. That means doing the work to learn more about who customers are and what they care about to present a more contextually relevant (and compelling) path to transaction or purchase.

That is the foundation of relationship marketing. Sounds great, but in reality, marketers face no shortage of challenges and barriers in achieving this goal. Fortunately, some solutions help with all these challenges.

Challenge: Unreliable Data and Privacy Concerns

Unreliable data and expanding privacy practices can make it increasingly difficult to identify and target the right audience effectively.

On one hand, the sheer volume of customer data available today to marketers can be overwhelming. However, data accuracy and reliability have become significant pain points as marketers struggle to separate the important signals from the noise, leading to wasted resources and misguided strategies.

On the other hand, sources of customer data are changing. The days of tapping into the torrent of third-party tracking cookie data to fuel campaigns are over, with consumers’ increasing concerns about data privacy fueling changes to privacy policy and practice. Regulations like GDPR and CCPA reflect a growing global movement towards empowering consumers and restricting unauthorized data usage.

Marketers find themselves in a delicate balance, respecting privacy while trying to connect with their audience.

Solutions:

• Offer privacy to every visitor and respect those who choose to embrace privacy
• Be transparent about how you use data
• Ask for and effectively utilize permissions in real-time

Challenge: The Creep Factor of Personalization

As marketers strive to create personalized experiences, they walk a fine line between relevance and intrusiveness. Consumers are more discerning about their digital footprint and are uncomfortable with the pervasive use of passive tracking and third-party data. The feeling of being watched and using data they didn’t intentionally provide can be unsettling, leading to a decline in trust and engagement with brands.

Solution:

• Focus on zero-party data – ask for customer data directly and appropriately apply it for their benefit
• Ask for and utilize preferences and interests
• Identify real engagement from bots
• Leverage reporting to build better audiences

Challenge: The Generic Incentive Trap

Many marketers resort to offering generic incentives to entice consumers to share their information in an attempt to overcome the challenges of data reliability and privacy concerns. However, in their rush to gather email addresses, phone numbers and other personal details, they need to remember to establish a genuine connection.

This approach usually results in a one-and-done shopping experience, where consumers provide their information for a short-term benefit but quickly disengage once the incentive is redeemed.

Real relationship marketing begins with understanding and addressing these challenges and finding innovative solutions, prioritizing privacy, relevance, and genuine connections with consumers to drive loyalty over time.

Solution:

• Ask for permission to personalize offers
• Entice visitors to become members
• Reward members for interacting with your brand
• Communicate on a more personal level and offer more accurate recommendations

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Challenge: Efficiency

While offering unparalleled opportunities, the digital landscape has also become increasingly complex and resource-intensive, leaving marketers grappling with the effort-versus-benefit equation.

Multiple tech stacks addressing different challenges often do one thing well but work together less so. This can result in parallel efforts that often operate independently, leaving time and money on the table, not to mention results.

Solution:

• Build audiences with relevant data that can be used again and again
• Identify human interaction for segmentation and personalization
• Connect with the right people, not just more people

Challenge: Doing More With Less

While digital marketing costs are on the rise, the returns don’t always match the investment. The expense of running campaigns across various platforms often outweighs the benefits, making it harder for marketers to justify their budgets and demonstrate ROI.

Marketing teams are facing the pressure to achieve more with limited resources. Budget constraints and leaner teams mean that marketers need to be strategic and creative in their approach. This challenge highlights the need for efficiency in processes, automation, and streamlined strategies that maximize impact without stretching resources thin.

Solution:

• Work across the customer lifecycle with one vendor
• Invest in a martech stack that works together seamlessly and offers innovation fit to industry needs. Ideally, the retained solutions will have the ability to integrate with data lakes or data warehouses so marketers can access and action customer data, regardless of where it resides
• Build data-driven customer journeys
• Combine A/B testing with AI recommendations to optimize

Challenge: Loyalty and Trust

Standing out in a crowded marketplace is more difficult than ever. Consumers are inundated with an onslaught of choices and promotions across every conceivable channel. As a result, building and maintaining customer loyalty has become a much more formidable task.

In this environment, brands can’t afford to deliver communications that lack relevance or authenticity. Doing so results in indifference among consumers who expect personalized experiences that align with their preferences and needs. Brands that fail to provide timely and relevant communication risk losing their audience to competitors who understand and cater to their desires.

Solution:

• Identify customers with the most loyalty potential
• Proactively reactivate at-risk customers
• Maintain accurate customer profiles that reveal the person’s interests
• Overlay commercial data sources to spot true marketing impact
• Supercharge recommendations with AI-powered content and subject lines
• Personalize offers and communications
• Reward members for interacting with your brand

Relationship Marketing is a long-term strategy focused on the customer relationship over time, not on a single touchpoint, campaign or transaction. These challenges and their solutions require a martech platform built to acquire, nurture, and grow customer relationships in a unified approach that allows brands to engage with consumers at every stage of their journey. Brands will gain several advantages by simplifying processes and ensuring they work together.

This includes offering customers a far more consistent and personalized experience than with disparate solutions not designed to work together and the ability to scale from one feature to many as their business quickly or needs grow.

Finally, a unified platform can deliver data insights across multiple touchpoints, allowing businesses to create meaningful, personalized connections with their customers.

In the face of these challenges, marketers must strive for efficiency, seeking innovative ways to optimize resources and streamline their strategies while prioritizing customer loyalty with personalized, relevant experiences. This delicate balancing act will define success in the ever-evolving marketing landscape.

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