Business concepts and buzzwords come and go. Kaizen marketing, "the customer is always right"... you've probably heard them all. Some concepts are right for their times or for a specialized target market.

Others are more enduring. One of those enduring concepts is the idea of "relationship marketing". So what is it? Well... Relationship marketing is an emphasis on building a long term rapport with customers rather than individual transactions.

There are many ways to do it. One of the ways I've found to work best, though, is by sending out hand-written, printed and personalized greeting cards to show my customers that I appreciate them, that I'm thinking of them, and that I value their business.

According to Wikipedia, relationship marketing is defined as follows:

"Relationship marketing is a form of marketing that evolved from direct response marketing in the 1960s and emerged in the 1980s, in which emphasis is placed on building longer term relationships with customers rather than on individual transactions. It involves understanding the customer's needs as they go through their life cycles. It emphasizes providing a range of products or services to existing customers as they need them."