Customer relationship management is a major element of successful marketing. However, it’s often one-on-one, between the brand and a particular customer at a time. How can you leverage customer relationships to benefit your brand?

Having developed with the age of digital marketing is the concept of “sharing” – encouraging audiences to share compelling original content through with their social networks. Most commonly the items shared are in the form of blog posts, Tweets, photos, and videos, but even customer relationships can be shared…

Marketing Profs suggested the following scenario, regarding positive feedback emails from customers:

  • An email comes in.
  • An email goes out thanking them and asking if we can use it for marketing.
  • Permission is almost always granted.
  • Email goes out after content is posted, inviting the writer to see the content and SHARE it to their Facebook.
  • Writer almost always does.
  • New traffic comes in from both Organic Search and from Facebook Referrals.
  • Email subscriber list grows.

So, from one email that would have simply died (or, at best, been printed out and put on a bulletin board), you now get search traffic from Google and lots of referral traffic from Facebook.

Share

It’s not uncommon for companies to receive these types of “love letters” – letters and emails praising your products and/or services. So, why not leverage these customer relationship interactions? They’re the best kind of testimonial you can share since they are completely unsolicited, coming from an honest and evidently passionate source. Chances are your customer will be honored to have the chance to “speak” on your behalf. Rather than ending the communication with a “thank you,” that communication can become original content to improve social media marketing and search engine optimization efforts.