Definition: “An approach to building long and sustaining business with the customers is called as Customer relationship management (CRM).”

Four marketing activities:

The four activities that comprise CRM are as follows:

i. Customer selection:

1. Customer selection means defining the types of customers that a company will market to.
2. It means identifying different groups of customers for which to develop offerings for and to target during acquisition, retention and extension.
3. Different ways of segmenting customers by value and by their detailed lifecycle with the customers are reviewed.
4. From an e-business perspective, we may want to selectively target customer types who have adopted e-commerce.

ii. Customer acquisition:

1. Customer acquisition refers to marketing activities intended to form relationships with new customers while minimizing acquisition costs and targeting high value customers.
2. Service quality and selecting the right channels for different customers are important .at this stage and throughout the lifecycle.

iii. Customer retention:

1. Customer retention refers to marketing activities take by an organization to keep its existing customers.
2. Identifying relevant offerings based on their individual needs and detailed position in the customer lifecycle is the key.

iv. Customer extension:

1. Customer extension refers to increasing the depth and range of products that the customer purchases from a company.
2. This is often referred to as ‘Customer development’.

Difference between B2B and B2C buyers:

The main differences between the B2B and B2C buyers are as follows:

i. Market Structure:

1. One of the main differences involved while promoting the website is the number of buyers.

2. In B2B there tend to be far fewer but larger buyers.

3. First, with few buyers, the existence of suppliers tends to be well known. This means that efforts to promote the website using methods such as banner advertising or listing in search engines are less important than for consumer brands.
4. Existing customers can be contacted directly, to make customers aware of the website and how it can help them in their work.
5. For B2B suppliers with many potential customers, the promotion methods used will correspond more closely to those of the retail market.
6. Second, the existence of larger buyers is likely to mean that each is of great value to the supplier. The supplier therefore needs to understand the buyers needs from the website and put effort in to develop web based contents and services necessary to deliver these services.

ii. Nature of Buying unit:

1. Business process typically involve a more complex decision making process since more people are involved. The key factors include:
2. Users
3. Influencers
4. Buyers
5. Deciders
6. Gatekeepers
7. This complexity is needed for financial control and authorization.
8. The implications of this are the content of the website should be devised according to the different members of the buying unit who are going to visit the website.
9. While the site should make the buying process straight-forward, the content should be tailored for the users, influencers and deciders.

iii. Type of purchase:

1. The type of purchase will vary dynamically according to scale.
2. Company offering B2B services will have low volume, high value orders, while others selling items such as stationary will have high value, low volume orders.
3. With high value, low volume purchase the Internet is not likely to be involved in the transaction itself.
4. The high value, low volume orders are suitable for e-commerce transactions.
5. The buying decision for technical B2B products and services will typically be more complicated and lengthy than that of consumer products.
6. There may be a lengthy period of supplier selection and product evaluations. To assist in this B2B exchanges have been created.