Say you have a restaurant that is open 7 days a week for both lunch and dinner. There are 730 lunches and dinners in a year. As the restaurant owner you could get someone to eat all of those meals at your restaurant. Not likely, but you might be able to get them to eat with you once a month or more.
In ‘transactional marketing think’ you would see each customer as worth a single meal where in relationship marketing each customer is worth up to 730 meals a year for many years. So a relationship marketer would invest to get the customer to come in the first time. Then invest in forming a relationship with each customer, so that they returned many times until they moved away.
A great relationship marketing example is sending your customers a printed, monthly, customer newsletter.
A newsletter that shows up every month at the same time of the month 12 times a year, just like their favourite magazine. They will see that you as the business owner want to have a relationship with the customer and over time they will prefer to patronise your business to the exclusion of other businesses.
How many times has someone remarked to you that they prefer one store over another simply because the staff are friendly, polite and courteous, despite the other store offering cheaper prices? A relationship marketing example trumping transactional marketing.