'Relationship Marketing' is fairly basic and wont take very long to explain.
Today, Relationship Marketing is most commonly conducted via the social networking sites that a business or business-owner uses and is more or less an extension of 'Social Media Marketing'.
It involves direct communication between the business owner (or a representative) and their customers / fans.
It is perhaps one of the most over-looked forms of marketing, with business-owners neglecting it and being more in favor of marketing methods that involve content-creation.
I'm going to focus mainly on Facebook and Twitter.
By logging onto Facebook or Twitter and visiting a companies' page, you'll very likely see a lot of virtual interfacing between the business and its customers.
For example, on a companies' Facebook page people often like to ask questions in the comments section that can be answered by the administrator of the page.
If they are having technical issues or just have general questions they can usually get a speedy response from someone who can help them in real-time, rather than waiting for a reply to a support ticket or being on hold on the phone for 20 minutes.
On Twitter, you can see a lot of customer-interfacing taking place by way of "re-tweeting".
Business owners who use Twitter can cooperate with each other by re-tweeting each others' tweets.
This is mutually beneficial as the two business owners and their brands are being exposed to each others' audiences.
It is beneficial for a business owner who wishes to market their business this way to find other business owners in a somewhat related niche to their own, but not a direct competitor.
Let's say, for example, that your niche is car parts.
More specifically, you specialize in selling car exhaust systems online.
You wouldn't try to form a mutual agreement with someone else who is in the exhaust system niche, but you could work together with somebody who specializes in car gearboxes.
The two are related, as they're both car parts, but they're different enough to not be in direct competition with one-another.
You can retweet each others' tweets and both reach a wider audience.
A big part of Relationship Marketing is the use of interactive tools such as polls, quizzes, games and competitions.
These are all fantastic ways of encouraging customers to engage with the business on a more personal level.
These can all be done online using social media and the best thing about them is that they can be shared by your customers with their online friends and followers, thus increasing your exposure, growing your audience and bringing you more traffic.
These are all extremely effective ways of marketing any business and relationship marketing should be among your top priorities when marketing your business.