While relationship marketing is a sales and marketing concept, CRM refers to the tools used to carry out the concept. Relationship marketing is implemented as a strategy and includes activities such as identifying long-term sales and retention goals, public relations, marketing and advertising campaigns.
CRM includes the operational tasks that support the relationship marketing strategy. Acitivities may include gathering data about the customers, then organizing and analyzing it to create target customer profiles. CRM data is also effective in finding opportunities to create special offers to reward long-time customers for their loyalty, further building the relationship.