A critical customer relationship marketing process: know, like, and trust

The psychological process your customer experiences while developing the affinity bond with you and your business is vitally important to your business.

Your goal with each of your customers should be to convert them from single time buyers to regular customers buying from you regularly and consistently. Each business should strive for this result; however, it is a process that the business management must design, develop, and pursue relentlessly to be effective.

The Affinity Bond

It may be referred to as the "affinity bond(TM)."  The affinity bond is the relationship you and your customer have relative to your business.  Keep in mind that marketing is a relationship business. Once your customers have given you their contact information, you can, and certainly should, begin developing that all-important relationship bond with them.

Each contact with your customer is one small thread of connection that will develop into a very powerful rope almost tying your customer to you insuring future purchases for a period of years. Of course, in the process of affinity bonding it is not necessary to do that with a face-to-face contact, though that does count. You can contact your customers with email, postcards and letters, telephone calls, faxes, etc.

Getting to Know

Every person prefers to purchase goods and services from someone he or she knows. That makes sense, doesn't it? If you know someone, you feel more comfortable with what he or she has to say. Of course, if you don't like or trust that person, you will simply move on to some other source.

The better a person knows another person -- or a business -- the closer he or she feels to that other person or business.

Getting to Like

The next stage in the affinity bonding process is to come to "like" the person we have recently come to "know." This takes more interaction -- more interchanges in the affinity bonding process. As the business continues the process, its customers gradually grow to enjoy the relationship with the business

This process is part of developing relationships. Good relationships don't simply develop instantly. They take time and multiple contacts. As the business continues its program of affinity bonding, a form of customer relationship marketing, the relationship with its customers becomes closer, more enjoyable and more profitable for all concerned.

Getting to Trust

After a person, in this case your customer, has come to like someone you and your business, he or she has even more confidence in what you and your business says or recommends. As that confidence develops, he or she comes to "trust" you and your business even more. Your customer begins to not only have confidence in what you say, he or she also develops a trust in everything you say. Again, notice that this is a process which occurs over multiple contacts and interchanges preferably over weeks, months, and years.

Any way you do it, by all means build the "know, like, and trust" pattern in the people on your list. This is the beginning of turning your customers into raving fans!

© 2009, Paul Elliott, All rights reserved world wide.