This past Thursday we celebrated Thanksgiving here in the U.S. It got me thinking about how grateful I am to have my own business and for the people who have supported me throughout the years. Being an entrepreneur has been quite a journey and I have had alot of help along the way.
So, when was the last time you thanked your customers for their business?
If your mind has drawn a blank, then maybe it's time to think about what you can do to show appreciation for the people who keep your business up and running!
Here are my top 3 ways to show appreciation to your customers:
1. Write a thank you card or letter. Don't underestimate the power of the written word! Here are some tips I shared about writing thank you cards.
2. Throw a party! I know a dentist who throws a huge appreciation party every year for all his clients/patients and their friends. Everyone gathers at a local park for food, games, prizes, and fun!
3. Reward loyal customers. You don't necessarily have to start a loyalty program or give out those cards that people tend to lose or forget. How about just recognizing the people who frequent your business often? Get to know their name and "reward" them when you feel inspired to. Of course this just works with small businesses and brick-and-mortar establishments. If you're a big company, perhaps a loyalty program might be better.
Do you have any other ideas or tips to show appreciation to your customers?
By the way, thank you for being a reader of this blog! I appreciate all of you who have participated in the Customer Service Carnivale, shared this blog with your Twitter followers, and shared ideas and comments. You inspire me to keep writing!
There have been two services our restaurant has used very effectively to show our customers appreciation.
We started using a constant contact type of service to try and keep our dispensary in the mind of our clients. The service is called Textagram (http://textagram.com/). It's pretty neat what they allow us to do. We started collecting our clients cell phone #'s and birthdays through promotional forms and then input that list into our account at textagram. Then when our clients birthday comes up textagram sends them a text message that we customize automatically the morning of their birthday. Our message tells them that if they come in within 3 days of their birthday we'll give them a 50% discount on their meal. They almost always come in! We can also schedule a promotion we do once a month and send a blast to all of our clients cell phone's informing them. We've found this form of promotions to be a lot more effective and personal than emails. Every once and awhile we'll have a client that doesn't want to receive texts from us so we just remove them from the list.
Something else we use is The Birthday Company (http://birthdayco.com/). With this service we enter our clients names, addresses and birthdays into our account and The Birthday Company mails them a card and or small chocolate gift that appears as if it were sent by us, with our own signature, logo, etc. We receive great feedback from our long returning customers with this service.
We've been a lot of work into keeping our clients and these two services have proven to be the most effective of the non standard methods.