Relationship Marketing is defined as “an organizations efforts to develop a long term, cost effective link with individual customer for mutual benefit.” Rather than focusing on a shorter sale, the sales representative tries to establish a long term bond, and rather than just selling, the sales department works with marketing to use techniques like data base marketing, message differentiation to different target markets and tracking of promotional effects to improve the relationship.
Relationship Marketing is simply a method of selling products and services by building up a relationship with customers. It begin with the clear understanding of who your customers are, what are their values, what they want to buy, how they prefer to interact with you and how they expect to serve them.
The ultimate outcome of relationship, marketing is building a strong marketing network. A marketing network consists of the company and its supporting stake holders-customers, employees, suppliers, distributors, retailers, ad agencies and others with whom it has built mutually profitable business relationships. Today most of the relationship marketing research is being done in services marketing.
Relationship marketing was first defined as a form of marketing developed from direct response marketing campaigns which emphasizes customer retention and satisfaction, rather than a dominant focus on sales transactions.