---
title: "Relationship marketing: How consumer brands build loyalty that lasts"
description: "Relationship marketing treats each customer interaction as part of an ongoing relationship. See how consumer brands build loyalty that outlasts a discount."
canonical_url: "https://www.braze.com/resources/articles/relationship-marketing"
language: "en-US"
datePublished: "2026-10-28T21:03:00.000Z"
publisher: "Braze"
authors:
  - "Team Braze"
---

# Relationship marketing: How consumer brands build loyalty that lasts

Relationship marketing is a strategy that treats each customer interaction as part of an ongoing relationship rather than an isolated transaction, using what a brand knows about a customer to earn attention over time instead of buying it repeatedly.

Transactional marketing works from the opposite starting point. Each campaign is built to win the next purchase, and the purchase after that has to be won all over again, often with another offer. Relationship marketing starts by looking at everything a customer has already done, then works out the most useful thing to send them next, and the best time to send it.

For consumer brands, that question plays out at a scale no account manager could handle alone. A retail app, a streaming service, or a food delivery brand may be talking to millions of people at once, across email, push, in-app messages, SMS, and WhatsApp. Treating each of those people as an individual depends on knowing who they are, honoring what they've agreed to receive, and acting on their behavior wherever they show up.

This guide covers what relationship marketing means for consumer brands running [lifecycle programs](https://www.braze.com/resources/articles/customer-lifecycle-marketing). It looks at how behavioral data changed the practice, the techniques that make a relationship program work, examples across channels, what the approach returns, and what it asks of your marketing stack.

**TL;DR**

- Transactional marketing focuses on winning the next sale, while relationship marketing uses what a brand knows about each customer to earn their attention over time.
- The practice depends on four conditions, which are identity, consent, memory of past behavior, and the ability to act on that memory across channels.
- Five techniques create a successful relationship marketing program, and managing the total number of messages each customer receives across every program is often where brands struggle.
- Retention, repeat purchases, and lifetime value build over months, so measuring against a holdout group is the most reliable way to show what a program adds.
- Customers also benefit through loyalty perks, easier buying, and fewer irrelevant, better-timed messages.

## What is relationship marketing?

Relationship marketing is a strategy that treats each customer interaction as part of an ongoing relationship rather than an isolated transaction, using what a brand knows about a customer to earn attention over time instead of buying it repeatedly.

Relationship or relational marketing, as it’s sometimes called, is usually compared with transactional marketing, which optimizes the next purchase and counts a campaign as successful if the customer buys.

Relationship marketing optimizes the sequence of purchases and the cost of earning each one, so a team working this way might look at whether a customer's fifth order needed a smaller incentive than their first, or whether someone who signed up a year ago is still opening their messages.

### Transactional vs. relationship marketing

|  | Transactional marketing | Relationship marketing |
| --- | --- | --- |
| What it optimizes | The next purchase | The sequence of purchases and the cost of earning each one |
| How success is measured | What each campaign sold | Repeat orders, ongoing engagement, and how much incentive each purchase needed |
| Time horizon | The length of the campaign | The length of the customer relationship |
| What decides when a message goes out | The marketing calendar | What each customer has done and how they prefer to hear from you |
| Who receives the same message | Everyone in the campaign audience | Customers whose behavior and preferences make it relevant to them |
| Where it fits well | Product launches, seasonal sales, and limited-time offers | Onboarding, replenishment, loyalty programs, and win-back |

Relationship marketing can also get mixed up with customer relationship management (CRM). A CRM is a system of record, built to manage customer and account records and the workflows around them, usually for sales and service teams. It can hold a lot of useful information about each customer, but isn't designed to coordinate messaging across channels in real time, so on its own it can't decide what a customer should receive next or send it to them. Relationship marketing is the practice of making those decisions. Consumer brands with large audiences usually run it from a [customer engagement platform](https://www.braze.com/resources/articles/what-is-a-customer-engagement-platform), which connects customer data to the channels where messages go out and acts on it as customer behavior changes.

Treating customers as individuals at that scale relies on four conditions.

- **Identity:** One profile for each customer, so the person browsing your website and the person using your app are recognized as the same customer.
- **Consent:** A record of what each customer has agreed to receive and on which channels, kept current as their preferences change.
- **Memory of past behavior:** A history of what each customer has bought and how they've responded to your messages over time.
- **The ability to act on that memory across channels:** A way to turn that history into the next message and send it through the channel the customer uses most.

## Why the practice changed when brands got behavioral data

Relationship marketing grew out of services marketing as an account-management idea, where companies can build long-term relationships with the clients they deal with directly. When someone at a bank or an agency, for example, manages the same clients for years, remembering each client's history shapes the next conversation and comes with the job.

Some consumer brands could only approximate this, however. A retailer with a loyalty card or a catalog mailing list might segment customers to provide more relevant offers, but had little view into what any one person did between purchases, and most of its messages went out when the marketing calendar said they should, perhaps weekly or when a new product or offer was launched.

What changed first was the advent of identity resolution across the web and mobile apps. Now, brands can recognize that the person browsing your site on a laptop and ordering in your app are the same customer, and keep a single profile for them that builds on itself with every visit.

Event-level behavioral data adds detail. Along with what someone bought, brands can now record the individual actions around a purchase, like a search, a saved item, an abandoned checkout, or going a week without opening your app. Each of these gives brands a reason to say something useful, or a reason to hold back.

The channels also moved closer to the customer. Push notifications, in-app messages, SMS, and WhatsApp reach people on the devices they already carry, so you can respond to something a customer did just a few minutes ago, while the message is still relevant to them.

All of this depends on consent. [First-party data](https://www.braze.com/resources/articles/first-party-data) that customers have agreed to share, along with [zero-party data](https://www.braze.com/resources/articles/what-is-zero-party-data) (the preferences they've told a brand directly), is what allows you to use behavioral signals. With those pieces in place, a consumer brand with millions of customers can do something close to what a good account manager has always done, which is remember each person and act on what they know, with a high degree of relevancy.

## The five relationship marketing techniques that make a relationship program work

A relationship marketing strategy holds together through habits that a team repeats in every program it runs across the [customer lifecycle](https://www.braze.com/resources/articles/customer-lifecycle-management), from onboarding to a loyalty program to win-back.

### 1. Earn and honor consent and preferences

Consent is the permission a customer gives you to contact them, and preferences are the details within it, like which channels they're happy to hear from and what they're interested in. Honoring both means storing them on the customer profile and checking them before any message goes out, whichever team or program is sending it. Problems start when consent lives in separate systems, so a customer who opts out of texts from one program might continue receiving them from another. Or, a brand asks for preferences at sign-up, but then sends the same messages it would have sent anyway. Sending more than a customer agreed to, or using data they didn't expect you to use, can make messages feel intrusive and even a little creepy, and customers who feel that way are more likely to unsubscribe or mark your messages as spam.

### 2. Remember and use what the customer has already done

Past behavior shapes the next message. Someone who browsed running shoes twice this week is a far better audience for a running shoe launch than your entire list, and someone who bought a product yesterday probably doesn't need an immediate message persuading them to buy again. Taking action on customer behavior requires behavioral data that sits on the customer's profile and is up to date at the moment a message is sent. When data refreshes only overnight, a customer can complete a purchase in the morning and still get an abandoned-cart reminder that afternoon. [Personalization](https://www.braze.com/resources/articles/personalized-marketing) that stops at using a first name in the subject line is another signal that past behavior isn't being put to use.

### 3. Match timing and channel to each customer

Every customer has their own patterns. One might open messages first thing in the morning, while another only engages in the evening, and some customers respond to one channel and ignore the rest. This technique uses those patterns, along with behavioral triggers, to decide when each person hears from you and where. It needs engagement history by channel and time of day for each customer, plus the ability to send a message when something happens instead of at a fixed slot. Without it, the right message can arrive at the wrong time or on the wrong channel and become the wrong message. A lunch offer that lands after lunch, or a text sent to someone who only ever engages in your app, is more likely to frustrate the customer than help them, and it makes the brand seem less relevant to them over time.

### 4. Manage total frequency across every program

Frequency management means controlling how many messages each customer receives from your brand in total, across every channel and program, within a set period (such as a day or a week).

Let’s picture a customer in their first week. They might get several messages from the welcome series, a promotional email about a sale, an invitation to join the loyalty program, a push notification about a restock, and a survey about their first order. Each of those comes from a team with a sensible reason for sending it, but together it adds up to seven or eight messages within a single week, from just one brand.

| Day | Message | Sent by | Channel | Without a cap | With a cap of 5 per week |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Day 1 | Order confirmation | Operations | Email | Sent | Sent (transactional, exempt from cap) |
| Day 1 | Welcome message 1 | Onboarding team | Email | Sent | Sent |
| Day 2 | Welcome message 2 | Onboarding team | Email | Sent | Held back (lowest priority) |
| Day 3 | Sale announcement | Promotions team | Email | Sent  | Sent |
| Day 3 | Loyalty program invitation | Loyalty team | In-app message | Sent | Sent |
| Day 4 | Welcome message 3 | Onboarding team | Email | Sent | Sent |
| Day 5 | Restock alert | Merchandising team | Push | Sent | Sent |
| Day 6 | First-order survey | Customer insights team | Email | Sent | Held back (cap reached) |
| Total |  |  |  | 8 messages | 6 messages (5 marketing + 1 transactional) |

Managing that total requires caps that apply to each customer across every channel and program, so someone who has reached their weekly limit doesn't receive another promotion. When messages compete for the same customer, priority rules decide which one goes out, so a loyalty reward might take precedence over a general sale. Transactional messages like order confirmations and delivery updates usually sit outside the cap, because customers expect them. It also helps to have one person or team who owns the total and keeps track of how many messages customers actually receive each week.

The effect tends to appear as unsubscribes, push opt-outs, and app uninstalls. These might be missed collectively, as a single team would see a slight rise in its own numbers and not realize the bigger impact. Your most engaged customers are often hit hardest, because they qualify for the most programs. This means the people you most want to keep can end up being the most tired of hearing from you.

### 5. Close the loop by measuring against a holdout

A holdout group is a random set of customers who don't receive a particular campaign, so you can compare what they do with what everyone else does and see what the campaign actually caused. A global control group works at a wider level. It's held back from a whole program, or from all of your marketing messages, which shows the combined effect of everything you send over time. Running either one properly means choosing the group at random, keeping it stable long enough for longer-term behavior to show, and measuring outcomes like repeat purchases and retention as well as opens and clicks. Without a holdout, it's easy to credit a replenishment reminder with orders from customers who would have reordered anyway. A holdout that's too small, reshuffled every few weeks, or judged only on click rates can also make a program look better or worse than it really is.

## What relationship marketing looks like in practice

Relationship marketing shows up most clearly in specific moments, such as a subscription coming up for renewal or a customer who hasn't ordered in a while. These examples from Braze customers show how consumer brands handle moments like these across email, push, in-app messages, SMS, and WhatsApp, and the results that followed.

### 8 examples of relationship marketing

#### 1. Membership-aware offers in email

A regular send, like a daily or weekly newsletter, checks each customer's membership or loyalty status at the moment it goes out and shows them offers to match. Members see the pricing and perks they've signed up for, while customers who are eligible to join see what membership would give them. Because the email reflects the customer's actual status, membership feels worth having, and non-members get a reason to join that's specific to them. Newsletter click-through rates and membership sign-ups show whether it's working.

![Three smartphone screens display member travel deals for a Maldives resort, Los Angeles dining, and a Melbourne hotel, with member-only pricing, early access, and bonus inclusions.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/b7pblshe/marketing-prod/d4d3f448836bf9403901b63c0f61594b866a7420-2400x1210.png)

- **Brand:** [Luxury Escapes](https://www.braze.com/customers/luxury-escapes-case-study), a travel brand operating across 27 markets
- **Trigger:** The launch of its LuxPlus+ membership, with each newsletter checking a subscriber's membership status at the moment of sending
- **What customers received:** Offer blocks built with Braze Catalogs and Liquid that changed with each subscriber's status. Members saw member-only pricing, bonus inclusions, early access, and hidden offers, while non-members saw the benefits of joining LuxPlus+ along with incentives to sign up.
- **Results:** 142% of its initial membership sign-up goal and a 10% increase in click-through rate on its daily newsletter. The LuxPlus+ launch email, a full-database send, achieved a 100% increase in CTR compared with its other full-database campaigns.

#### 2. Subscription extension before renewal in email

When a loyal subscriber is approaching renewal, they receive a personal offer to extend before they've had to think about whether to stay. Reaching them early rewards their loyalty while they're still happy with the service, which is a very different conversation from trying to win them back after they've cancelled. The share of targeted subscribers who extend, measured against a holdout, shows the real effect.

![A DYN promotional email template in German offers two months of live sports for the price of one, with a voucher code placeholder and redemption button.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/b7pblshe/marketing-prod/b69d7803bf7ab6a1853614ae32aa4214eaa16b58-2400x1210.png)

- **Brand:** [Dyn Media](https://www.braze.com/customers/dyn-media-case-study), a sports streaming service
- **Trigger:** Annual subscribers from earlier promotions approaching renewal
- **What customers received:** A recurring email with a unique voucher code assigned to their profile, sent as an initial message and two reminders over several days
- **Results:** An 80% unique open rate, a 50% unique click rate, and 75% of targeted customers extending their subscriptions after the three waves

#### 3. Personal updates through a big change, led by push

A change customers will notice, like a new menu, new pricing, or a redesigned app, is a moment when the relationship is at risk. Messages tailored to each customer's history can reassure people who might drift away, reward loyal customers, and follow up with anyone who explored what's new without buying. Hearing about the change in a way that reflects their own relationship with the brand helps customers trust it, and retention among at-risk customers shows whether that's happening.

- **Brand:** [Panera Bread](https://www.braze.com/customers/panera-case-study), the bakery-cafe chain
- **Trigger:** Its April 2024 menu update, the largest in its history, with more than 20 menu updates and nine new items
- **What customers received:** Push notifications coordinated with email and in-app messages, including push follow-ups with offers for guests who browsed new menu categories without ordering
- **Results:** A 5% retention lift among at-risk guests, double the loyalty offer redemptions, and double the purchase conversion rates from abandoned-order follow-ups

#### 4. AI-chosen messages for each subscriber, including push

Each day, a decisioning system evaluates every customer and picks the message, offer, timing, and channel most likely to suit them, sending a push notification when push is the right choice for that person. No two customers get quite the same treatment, and the system learns from every response. Subscriptions, cross-sells, and how well customers stay engaged through price changes show the impact.

- **Brand:** [Kayo Sports](https://www.braze.com/customers/kayo-sports-case-study), a sports streaming service
- **Trigger:** An automated daily decision cycle for each subscriber, built with Braze and BrazeAI Decisioning Studio™
- **What customers received:** Messages across email, SMS, push, and in-app, drawn from 1.2 million variations personalized for each individual, up from 300
- **Results:** A 14% increase in subscriptions in FY24 and a 105% increase in cross-sells, while the average subscription price increased by 20%

#### 5. A personal year-in-review in-app

At the end of the year, or on a membership anniversary, customers get an in-app recap of their own activity with the brand, like what they bought, the rewards they earned, and the milestones they reached. It shows the brand has been paying attention all year, and it gives customers something they're happy to keep and share. Engagement with the recap, social shares, and loyalty activity afterward show whether it landed.

- **Brand:** [e.l.f. Beauty](https://www.braze.com/customers/elf-case-study), the cosmetics brand
- **Trigger:** The end of 2024, for members of its Beauty Squad loyalty program
- **What customers received:** Beauty Squad Replay, a personalized in-app experience showcasing each member's 2024 milestones, followed by an in-app landing page with 21 Content Cards reflecting their individual data. Push and email brought members into the app to see it.
- **Results:** 25% of those who engaged with the campaign shared it on their social media pages. Across its wider program, e.l.f. saw a 58% increase in loyalty offer redemptions in 2024 compared with 2023.

#### 6. Occasion campaigns segmented by relationship stage, led by WhatsApp

Ahead of a gifting occasion, customers are grouped by how recently and how often they've bought, and each group gets a message that fits where they are. A new customer, a regular, and someone who hasn't ordered in months each hear something different, at the time they're most likely to engage, with a link straight to the relevant collection. Read rates, reviews, and revenue by channel show how well it's working.

![Two promotional message cards advertise Floward Valentine’s collections and scheduled flower deliveries, featuring a teddy bear with red roses and a couple holding a bouquet.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/b7pblshe/marketing-prod/c11af26dee76489b593976f58d52cacfba200a6a-2400x1210.png)

- **Brand:** [Floward](https://www.braze.com/customers/floward-case-study), an online flower and gift brand
- **Trigger:** Valentine's Day, with customers segmented using recency, frequency, and monetary analysis and separate campaigns for each market
- **What customers received:** Messages across WhatsApp, push, in-app, and email, sent at each customer's most likely time to engage using Braze Intelligent Timing, with deep links to the Valentine's Day collection
- **Results:** A 55% WhatsApp read rate and a 21% increase in positive reviews. WhatsApp generated the highest revenue and conversion rates of all the channels Floward used.

#### 7. Weekly useful content for customers who opted in on WhatsApp

Customers who have opted in to a personal channel like WhatsApp receive regular content they can use, like a weekly menu or a roundup of new arrivals, with personalized recommendations and an offer included. Choosing to hear from a brand on WhatsApp is a sign of a closer relationship, and sending useful content there, not just promotions, respects that choice. Purchase rates on the channel, compared with other channels, show its value.

- **Brand:** [Pazza Pasta](https://www.braze.com/customers/circus-group-pazza-pasta-case-study), a food delivery brand run by Circus Group in Germany
- **Trigger:** Every Monday, when a new weekly menu goes live
- **What customers received:** A WhatsApp message with six dish choices and a €3 voucher code, generated automatically from its Braze Catalog, alongside AI-powered dish recommendations. Customers who had opted in to WhatsApp were removed from the email version, so they heard from the brand on the channel they'd chosen.
- **Results:** Purchase rates were six times higher on WhatsApp than on email for the weekly menu campaign, and 12 hours a week were saved by automating the campaign.

#### 8. Local offers by SMS based on ordering history

A customer receives an SMS from the local store they actually order from, based on their favorite items, how often they order, and when they last ordered. The message feels like it comes from somewhere that knows them, which makes it more welcome than a national promotion sent to everyone. SMS revenue, purchases, and complaint rates show whether customers value it.

- **Brand:** [Papa Johns UK](https://www.braze.com/customers/papa-johns-uk), a pizza delivery franchise with more than 400 locations
- **Trigger:** Campaigns launched by individual franchisees from a local marketing hub, built after Papa Johns UK moved its customer data from three separate CRMs into Braze. Franchisees can select audiences using data like favorite pizzas, order frequency, purchase dates, and postcodes.
- **What customers received:** Targeted SMS offers from their local store, created from pre-built templates, with quiet hours enabled automatically so messages don't arrive late at night or early in the morning
- **Results:** A 180% year-over-year uplift in SMS revenue, a 170% increase in purchases driven by SMS, and a 72% reduction in customer complaints related to messaging

## What a relationship program returns, and over what horizon

The returns from relationship marketing build slowly and compound over time. A replenishment reminder or a well-timed renewal offer might add a modest number of orders in its first month, while a promotion sent the same week can produce a much bigger spike in sales. Compared over a few weeks, the promotion tends to win, which is often why relationship programs are among the first to lose budget when spending gets reviewed. Most of their value arrives later, as customers come back without needing a discount and stay engaged for longer.

Because these returns build over months, they need measuring over months too. Engagement signals like opens and clicks can show change within weeks, but repeat purchase rate and retention can take a quarter or more to move, and lifetime value takes longer still. A holdout group kept stable over that period shows what the program has actually added, which gives you the evidence to defend its budget.

### Advantages of relationship marketing for brands

Retention is the most direct return, and the window to earn it is short for apps. AppsFlyer's 2025 benchmarks put Day 30 retention, [the share of people still using an app 30 days after installing it, at between roughly 1% and 6% for most app categories](https://www.appsflyer.com/benchmarks/), with shopping apps at 4.99% on Android and 4.24% on iOS. Every customer that effective [customer retention strategies](https://www.braze.com/resources/articles/customer-retention-strategies) keep engaged past that point is one the brand doesn't have to replace. Brands that add messaging channels, up to six in total, see an average 56% uplift in 90-day retention, according to the Braze [Retention by Design](https://www.braze.com/resources/reports-and-guides/2024-retention-guide) playbook.

Dynamic Yield's benchmark data shows [global eCommerce conversion rates of between 2.33% and 3.38%](https://marketing.dynamicyield.com/benchmarks/conversion-rate/) of site visitors each month from October 2025 to September 2026, with September at 2.48%, meaning that most visits end without an order. A customer who has already bought from you has shown they're willing to buy, and each repeat order earned through a timely, relevant message is revenue that doesn't rely on winning over someone new.

A customer who stays longer and buys more often is worth more over the course of the relationship, so customer lifetime value rises as retention and repeat purchases improve. When each purchase needs a smaller discount to earn, the margin on that value also improves.

As more revenue comes from existing customers, a brand also relies less on paid media and promotions to bring new people in, and it's less exposed when acquisition costs rise.

### Benefits of relationship marketing for customers

Loyal customers often get more back from the brands they stick with. Loyalty program members and long-term subscribers can unlock perks and member-only pricing that new customers don't get, and those rewards can grow the longer the relationship lasts. Buying also gets easier. A brand that remembers a customer's past orders, sizes, and preferences can make reordering quick and point them toward products they're likely to want, which saves them from sifting through endless options from brands they know nothing about. Over time, that ease and familiarity can build brand affinity, so the brand becomes the one they turn to first.

The messages customers receive improve as well. Fewer land that have nothing to do with them, like a promotion for something they bought last week or an offer in a category they've never shown interest in, and the ones that do arrive tend to be better timed, reaching them when a subscription is due for renewal or when a regular order is likely to be running low. Because frequency is managed across programs, customers are also less likely to feel bombarded by one brand, which makes them more willing to keep notifications switched on and stay subscribed.

## What you need from a relationship marketing platform

A relationship marketing platform is [the system that holds each customer's profile](https://www.braze.com/resources/articles/what-is-a-customer-engagement-platform) and turns it into messages across channels. Demos can show the platform at work, but it helps to go in with questions that test whether it can support relationship marketing day-to-day, alongside the broader criteria for [choosing a cross-channel marketing platform](https://www.braze.com/resources/articles/cross-channel-marketing-platform). These questions become more important as engagement program maturity grows, because every new channel and program adds to what the platform has to coordinate.

### Can you resolve one customer across app, web, and email?

Ask how the platform recognizes that the person browsing anonymously on your website is the same customer who later signs in to your app and opens your emails, and what happens to their history when it does. A good answer explains how anonymous activity merges into a known profile once someone identifies themselves, so nothing they did beforehand is lost. If each channel keeps its own version of the customer, every other capability on this list is working from incomplete information.

### Can you store and honor consent and preferences at the profile level?

Consent and preferences need to live on the customer profile itself, with every channel and program checking them before anything is sent. Ask how opt-outs and preference changes are recorded, how quickly they take effect across channels, and whether any team's campaign can override them. When consent is stored separately for each channel, a customer who opts out in one place can easily keep hearing from you in another.

### Can you act on behavior across channels from that profile without exporting to another tool?

Ask whether a behavior recorded on the profile, like an abandoned checkout or a week without opening the app, can trigger a message on any channel directly, and how long that takes. Each export between tools adds delay and creates another copy of the data that can fall out of sync, which is how customers end up getting reminders about things they've already done. It's also worth asking whether frequency caps apply across every channel the platform sends from, so the total number of messages each customer receives stays under control.

### Can you hold out a control group and measure against it?

Ask whether you can set a random holdout for a single campaign as well as a global control group across all your messaging, and whether reporting compares those groups on outcomes like purchases and retention, not just opens and clicks. Without that, it's hard to show what relationship marketing is adding, especially over the months it takes for its returns to build.

## How Braze supports relationship marketing

Braze runs relationship marketing from a single customer profile, so the identity, consent, and behavior a program depends on are all in one place when each message is decided. The [Braze Data Platform](https://www.braze.com/product/braze-data-platform) resolves each customer's activity across app, web, and email into one profile, and its warehouse-native, zero-copy data activation lets teams build audiences and trigger messages directly from their cloud data warehouse without duplicating data. For a relationship program, that means what a customer did this morning can shape what they hear from you this afternoon.

From that same profile, [cross-channel messaging](https://www.braze.com/product/cross-channel-messaging) runs natively across email, push, in-app messages, web, SMS, and WhatsApp. A journey can move from one channel to the next based on how each customer responds, without handing data between separate tools along the way.

Guardrails keep the relationship on the right side of each customer's patience. Frequency capping and rate limiting apply across channels, so the total number of messages a customer receives stays under control, no matter which team is sending. Quiet hours stop messages arriving late at night or early in the morning, and because consent and preferences sit on the profile, every channel works from the same record of what each customer has agreed to receive.

[BrazeAI™](https://www.braze.com/product/brazeai) adds personalization and timing on top of that foundation. It can generate on-brand content and select which version each customer receives, while Intelligent Timing sends each message when that person is most likely to engage.

Teams can run control groups for individual campaigns and a Global Control Group that holds back a random share of customers from all messaging to understand program impact.

For enterprise brands, [BrazeAI Decisioning Studio™](https://www.braze.com/product/brazeai-decisioning-studio) goes a step further, making 1:1 decisions on the content, offer, channel, and timing for each customer to optimize any business KPI.

_See how consumer brands build lasting customer relationships on Braze._

## Relationship marketing FAQs

### What is relationship marketing?

Relationship marketing is a strategy that treats each customer interaction as part of an ongoing relationship rather than an isolated transaction, using what a brand knows about a customer to earn attention over time instead of buying it repeatedly. In practice, it depends on knowing who each customer is, what they've agreed to receive, and what they've done before.

### What is the difference between relationship marketing and transactional marketing?

Transactional marketing optimizes the next purchase and judges each campaign by what it sold. Relationship marketing optimizes the sequence of purchases and the cost of earning each one, using a customer's history and preferences to decide what to send and when. A brand can run both, with sales and launches alongside its lifecycle programs.

### What are examples of relationship marketing?

Examples include newsletters that show offers based on a customer's membership status, renewal offers sent before a subscription lapses, personalized year-in-review experiences in an app, WhatsApp messages tailored to how recently someone last ordered, and SMS offers from the local store a customer actually uses, each based on that customer's own history.

### Is relationship marketing the same as CRM?

No. A CRM is a system of record for accounts and contacts, typically built around sales and service workflows. Relationship marketing is a practice, the work of deciding what each customer hears and when. A consumer brand usually runs that practice from a [customer engagement platform](https://www.braze.com/resources/articles/what-is-a-customer-engagement-platform), which acts on customer data across channels.

### In email marketing, what is a relationship email?

A relationship email updates a customer about an existing relationship with a brand, like a change to their account, membership, or subscription terms. Under the US CAN-SPAM Act, these "transactional or relationship" messages are mostly exempt from the rules for commercial email, provided they don't contain false or misleading routing information.

### How do you measure relationship marketing?

Compare customers who receive a program with a random holdout group who don't, then track outcomes like retention, repeat purchase rate, and customer lifetime value over several months. Opens and clicks show early engagement, but the holdout comparison shows what the program actually added beyond what customers would have done anyway.

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*Published 2026-10-28T21:03:00.000Z · canonical lives at https://www.braze.com/resources/articles/relationship-marketing*