Below are a few principles to help get your started thinking in terms of how to develop an effective relationship marketing program for your company. The following principles focus on the first stage of relationship marketing, which is often called nurture, because you are nurturing and developing a relationship with a client that will potentially be a long term one.

Identify and Target Prospects Carefully

Most direct marketers will tell you that the quality of your customer list is the single most important factor in determining how effective your marketing campaign will be. In the nurturing phase of developing a relationship marketing plan, it is important to identify potential customers using a variety of personalized tactics including: geographic, demographic, attitudinal, and behavioral attributes of your potential clients. The more narrowly you define your target audience, the more specific your marketing messages can be, and the better results you will have.

Build Awareness

Even though relationship marketing relies heavily on marketing strategies that are one-to-one and generally response-focused, building the awareness of your products and services is an integral part of success in developing potential clients. Customers with a general awareness of your brand will be much more likely to initially purchase your products and to eventually provide you with information about themselves to help you facilitate a more targeted platform than if the potential customer had no awareness of your products and services.

Collect Information

Listening and gathering information needs to start at the very beginning of your relationship marketing strategy. If you've identified and targeted your customers carefully, you probably already know some basic information about your potential customers. But it is important to continue to amend the information you have by asking your existing clients for more specific information, such as email addresses and phone numbers, as well as their feedback on products and services that they have purchased.

Build Trust

Trust is one of two components necessary for customers to perceive you as their "trusted advisor," which is critical maintaining a long-term relationship with your clients. Trust results from a series of small actions taken over time, and must be closely guarded because it can disappear very easily. You can demonstrate trust by demonstrating that the needs of your customers and clients come before your needs as a business owner. Nurturing a successful relationship marketing platform means demonstrating a customer-centered approach to your business. By letting the client know that you are focused on his needs as a customer, more than your own needs as a business-owner, you will nurture and build trusting relationships with your clients.

The nurturing process has only just begun - nurturing a client relationship is something you will continue to do throughout the life of your relationship with the client. These steps will help get you started in the right direction for designing a relationship marketing platform from a perspective of nurturing and developing potential relationships.