Consumers today are bombarded with constant messages from advertisers in every direction. They have messages shoved in their faces while driving from the radio and on billboards, while surfing the internet, and even while using the bathroom in many restaurants. It’s non-stop. So how are we, as small businesses, supposed to cut through the clouds of smoke and mirrors to differentiate ourselves from others and build brand loyalty?
Memorable is Still Bad
As I spoke about in November, being just memorable is bad. We want our customers to have an unforgettable experience that they must tell everyone about. When people leave our store, our website, or our offices we want them to walk away feeling like they have been taken care of.
Today’s consumer is accustomed to a few things from businesses.
- being barraged with marketing messages every minute of every hour (Thanks David Ogilvy)
- being treated like cattle (Thanks airline industry)
- getting what they want, when they want it, if they whine loud enough… even when they’re wrong (Thanks Wal-Mart)
I see two solutions to these scenarios. We can attempt to break our customers of this and retrain them. OR we can take the Steve Martin approach and “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” I choose the latter for this example.
Brand Loyalty
They must leave the interaction with our company feeling like we have become a partner, a companion, or even a friend. Any one of the above acquaintances would have a hard time cancelling an order, writing a bad review online, or even complaining about minor blemishes in a product.
When we can achieve this level of brand loyalty, the flywheel has turned for us. People do not want to offend a friend, they do not want to burn a bridge with a partner, most people generally want to be liked (there are ALWAYS exceptions). People don’t want to let a companion down by buying from another brand. They have a sense of responsibility driving them to come to us, bypassing our competitors.
When people become loyal to our brand, they will forgo others even if their prices are lower. Yes it’s shocking to hear, but it’s true. They will drive further because they know they will be taken care of and they will get a genuine transaction. And most importantly, they will become spokespeople for our brand. This is the biggest determining factor of how your brand should be measured: How many referrals does your brand get? If you get none, you need drastic changes. If you get many, find out why and put those reasons at the core of your business.
However, people will not become loyal to our brand until we treat them like they are special to us. OK Mike, I get it, we need to treat them right, we need to blow them away, we need to make them fall in love with us… get to the instructions!
Personalized Touch
We can’t expect people to be loyal to us until we’re loyal to them. All relationships, including consumer relationships, are two-way streets. If neither party makes a leap of faith to build that relationship, it never grows. The one that leaps first will always set themselves up to be let down. When dating, its commonly referenced as ‘keeping our walls up’ so we don’t get hurt. As businesses, we cannot operate with our walls up. We have to be the first to make that leap of faith and put ourselves out there.
Using hand-written thank you notes is the best way to build relationships and begin to put our businesses out there. A hand-written thank you note tells the recipient that we not only took the time to get a card, but to put our email aside, drop our phones, and write them a personalized message. There’s no way this could be duplicated, there’s no way it could be spammed, it is a personalized note addressed to one person (or business in a B2B world) expressing gratitude.
Thank you notes can be sent after a customer purchased, checking up on their satisfaction. It can come after a sales call, a perfect follow-up for those multi-encounter deals. They can come after a job interview, just thanking someone for their time. There are countless other times that a hand-written thank you note can strengthen a relationship. As I talked about last week, we all yearn for connections, this is a perfect way to do it.
Side Effects
The most important part about sending hand-written thank you notes is the accountability it creates. When we know that we’ll follow up with a customer after a sales call, we pay extra attention to what they’re saying. If not, how would we personalize the message? Taking the time to write thank you notes forces us to pay attention to our customers and treat them as humans instead of cattle. It shows them that we care about them and we’ll do what it takes to make their situation correct if something has gone wrong. And finally, it makes us stick out from the crowd.
When we are so good that we can’t be ignored, we set ourselves up for success by giving our customers something to talk about. When we make that interaction so personal with a hand-written thank you note we are building brand loyalty and simultaneously encouraging those people to be speak on our behalf. And if we’re doing a great job creating an unforgettable experience, we know they’ll have nothing but awesome to talk about!
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Do you write thank you notes by hand? If not, where can you implement this practice to grow your business? Leave me a comment or connect with me on Twitter, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this follow-up technique!
P.S. 8 Days till Christmas!
