This past spring I was reading an article about customer retention and how to figure out the LTV (life-time-value) of loyal customers. Being in the ultra-competitive financial planning industry, I was hoping to find ways to satisfy my customers beyond just making smart decisions with their assets. The article made a strong point that it is important to make your customers feel that you are thinking about them even when you aren't necessarily working on their portfolio. I started thinking to myself, "What can I do to make my clients feel valued?"
I came to the conclusion that letting my clients know how much I value their business would not be as hard as I thought if I just made a point to get them small gifts and cards on their birthdays and on holidays. The question I then asked myself was how much time will I spend personalizing and mailing out these gifts to my client base that is now approaching 200? Isn't there a more efficient and cost effective way to get this done and still achieve the same results?
So I did some searching online and found the answer is yes. I came across a business called The Birthday Company based in Coralville, Iowa that specializes in corporate gift delivery services. I went to their website www(dot)birthdayco(dot)com and after signing up for an account (which is free) I was able to solve my problem.
Once I created my account on the website, they sent me a free sample and in four days I received a beautifully personalized card as well as a tasty gift. At this point I was sold so I simply emailed a spreadsheet containing the names, addresses, and birthdays of my clients, which they entered into my password protected account for me (also free). Then I selected an account budget between $2.95 and $29.95 per client mailing. I am now able to sign into my account to view and make changes to my client list, like addresses, gift/price categories, add/delete clients. I can even personalize greetings for my entire list or for specific clients.
The Birthday Company now sends all of my customers a personalized card and gift on their birthdays. The gifts are randomly selected from gourmet chocolates, specialty candies, fancy brittles, toffees and Starbucks Cards and are automatically rotated so the customer will never receive the same gift twice. They also rotate dozens of greeting card designs so that even my clients in the same household (husband & wife) will get different birthday cards. The best part is the envelopes are personalized with my return address so it appears I took the time to send them myself!
I think I am starting to figure out this customer retention idea. Over the past six months, I've noticed the referrals from current clients has nearly doubled, allowing me to finally scale back on the time consuming and expensive investor seminars, print advertising and radio spots I had been doing for several years. Please don't get me wrong, I think these strategies are extremely important for someone trying to break into this crazy business, but after five years and a solid client base, I'm finding it's much easier to convince someone they need my services when they're a referral than it is to convince a stranger.
My next step is to try out the holiday, anniversary, and thank you mailings The Birthday Company offers to their customers. If it works as well as the birthday mailings have, maybe I'll be able to rely on just referrals to build my business from here on. Wish me luck.
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