If you’re an entrepreneur or a marketer, you obviously calculate the return on investment (ROI) for every business decision. But have you ever wondered about the returns you can get by building strong relationships with your customers and stakeholders?
That’s where the concept of ‘Return on Relationship’ comes into play. The term was coined in 2009 by noted social media strategist Ted Rubin, who asserted that contemporary businesses can achieve massive growth and value by building and nurturing longstanding relationships.
Four years later, he published a book titled “Return on Relationship: Relationships Are the New Currency: Honor Them, Invest in Them, and Start Measuring Your ROR,” which he co-authored with award-winning and best-selling author Kathryn Rose. Since then, the concept has transformed the way many organizations do business and cultivate relationships.
At LoyaltyXpert, we believe that you can accrue significant value by nurturing relationships with all your stakeholders. This blog post discusses everything about ROR and what you can do to enhance it.
Importance of ROR for your organization
ROR is extremely necessary for the social media age. It not only will help you access your target market and attract your key stakeholders, but it will drive exponential growth and deliver a huge return on your time and money invested to nurture the relationships. Return on relationship provides the following benefits to your organization:
- New customers and followers
- Immense loyalty
- Credibility and brand value
- Recommendations and referrals
- Social media engagement and shares
Strategies to enhance ROR
Like any marketing strategy, ROR needs proper groundwork and a systematic roadmap. Here are some ways to enhance ROR.
1. Know every relevant thing about your stakeholders
To build a strong relationship with your stakeholders, you must know every relevant thing about them. At LoyaltyXpert, we know how important it is to know your customers, channel sales partners, and influencers and we have helped many of our clients in understanding their key stakeholders in the best possible way.
Empathy is the first step to building enduring relationships. To better understand your stakeholders, you must put yourself in their shoes and know what they feel and what problems they face. Only after knowing the relevant about your customers and other stakeholders, you can design the right solutions and offerings for them.
2. Listen to your customers and stakeholders
“If you don’t listen to your customers, someone else will.” The proverb by Walmart founder Sam Walton is so relevant than ever before. When interacting with your customers listen to them closely and understand what they say and what they expect from you. Once you understand their pain points and the solutions they need, nothing can stop you from developing an enduring connection with them.
When interacting with your customers and all other stakeholders on social networks and forums, listen with the intent to understand. Read comments, tweets, reviews, and other online mentions to understand your target audience better.
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3. Focus on continuous engagement
To build and nurture longstanding relationships, you need to start interesting conversations and invest time to engage and make the interaction a continuous process. Focus on consistency and once you are consistent with your interactions and commitment, it will motivate your target audience to engage with you regularly. Remember, when it comes to building and nurturing relationships consistency wins over intensity, every single time.
4. Leverage high-quality loyalty programs
When it comes to building long-lasting relationships and loyalty, nothing can beat loyalty programs. You need to use various loyalty programs to build and nurture relationships with different stakeholders in your business. Using channel loyalty programs will enable you to build robust relationships with your channel sales partners and keep them loyal for a long time. Brand loyalty programs can be extremely effective to create an emotional brand connection with your customers and strengthen your bond with them over time. Also, influencer loyalty programs will help you create strong relationships with the key influencers in your industry. To run highly effective loyalty programs, you will need a sophisticated loyalty platform. This is where a reliable loyalty solutions provider such as LoyaltyXpert can help you select the best loyalty software.
5. Provide exceptional service
Last but not the least, the key to building and nurturing robust relationships is to provide exceptional service to all stakeholders. Look for areas where you can serve the stakeholders in the best possible manner. The more value you add, the stronger the bond will be.
The most successful companies such as Zappos, Starbucks, Stitch Fix, and Hilton, just to name a few religiously focus on delivering the best service to their stakeholders. And that gives them a cult-like status and following.
Taking everything into account,
Never in the past was it possible for a brand to generate massive value based on relationships with customers and other stakeholders. That’s the power of ROR in the digital age! At LoyaltyXpert, we have helped many of our clients build strong relationships by providing our effective loyalty solutions and we can help you too. To know more about our software and services, contact us today.
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