Follow Up Success » Client Retention

Send Thanksgiving Cards to Follow Up With Your Clients!

Alan Underkofler — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:28:12 +0000

There are many reasons to send greeting cards to your customers. General follow up thank you cards, birthday cards, customer appreciation cards, and of course holiday cards. All of these customer follow up greeting cards should be a standard marketing practice for any business.

One of my favorite opportunities to reach out to existing customers and create stronger relationships is Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving after all is all about gratitude and what better way to show gratitude to your customers than by sending them a Thanksgiving card and letting them know how much you appreciate their business?

I truly believe in sending Thanksgiving cards to follow up with your customers and prospects. In fact I have recent memories of handwriting over 500 Thanksgiving cards to my clients not too long ago. This was a huge and exhausting task with each card containing two or three lines of personalized text. I spent well over two months completing this process! And while I was all gung-ho to send out holiday greeting cards to my clients as well… It was just not going to happen. I had all the holiday cards on my desk but could not get them completed in the two remaining weeks I had left. At the time I remember thinking there must be a better to get this done… Of course there is a better way and I discovered it about six months later. The next time I mailed Thanksgiving cards to my clients I sent 600 and did them all in about four hours instead of two months! I used an incredible system called SendOutCards and you can learn more about this process by visiting my Follow Up Tools page.

There are many reasons to send out Thanksgiving cards to your clients, prospects, and referral sources. The main one being appreciation. Everyone likes to be acknowledged and appreciated and when you do this your clients will do more business with you, prospects will start doing business with you, and your referral sources will send you even more referrals.

Now is the time! Start following up with your customers and prospects today with Thanksgiving cards!

Creating Stronger Relationships with Follow Up

Alan Underkofler — Tue, 12 May 2009 17:37:18 +0000

Follow up is crucial in creating relationships with your clients and prospects. The number one reason business owners and sales people give me when I ask them why they don’t follow up is “I don’t have time”. When I hear this I think to myself you can’t afford not to have time! I also think the excuse of “I don’t have time” is really the business owner or sales professional self sabotaging their own success. I have discussed many systems and follow up tools to help you automate the follow up process which makes the excuse of not having time seem crazy.

Think about this… If you are a business owner or sales professional how many new clients did you receive last year? Is it 10, 50, or 100 new clients? Now approximate the total sales or commissions you received from each client and divide this by the total number of new clients from last year. What is the number or average value of each client? Is it $200, $2,000, $20,000, or $200,000 in sales or commissions?

It does not matter what the number is. What is important is that you understand what the value of one client or prospect is to you. For example let’s say the value of one client is $2,000. The next time you think to yourself I don’t have the time to follow up realize this thought can be a potential loss of $2,000! If you retain your average client for 5 years this would be $10,000!

The number one reason you will lose a customer is not from price or a competitor knocking on their door every week. The number one reason is the feeling of indifference. Clients start looking elsewhere when they feel unappreciated. This can easily be solved by having a simple follow up system in place. Imagine if you implemented a system that could not only insure your clients felt appreciated but would also increase the lifetime value of each customer. Increasing the life of your customers by just one year or more could make a huge difference in your business.

I encourage you to leave a comment and let me know what your follow up system is. Are you following up with email, newsletters, post cards, greeting cards, phone calls? What are you doing to keep strong relationships with your customers and clients? If you need help creating a follow up system or just would like me to evaluate your follow up system please contact me.

Of Course I have a Referral and Follow Up System!

Alan Underkofler — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 16:20:03 +0000

A referral and follow up system… You may be asking yourself what do I need that for? I was reminded about a pretty well know fact after reading yesterdays post on Duct Tape Marketing by John Jantsch titled My Most Excellently Flawed Referral Survey. The survey questions had to do with the percentage of your business coming from referrals or word of mouth. Here is what John found:

69.3% felt over 50% of their business came by way of referral and yet, 79% further admitted they had no well-defined system to promote referral generation. The conclusion is we know how important referrals are yet we don’t take the time to create a system to attract them!

John also asked if you are not getting a consistent flow of referrals why not? 20% of the participants of the survey just skipped this question! Maybe after realizing so much business comes from referrals and acknowledging they have no system that thinking about why was just too much must for those in the survey to handle?

For years I have heard and seen similar numbers like this. Business owners and top sales professionals say things like the live for referrals yet if I ask the simple question of what do you do when you receive a referral I more often than not get a blank stare.

Receiving more referrals is pretty simple and there are many ways to do this.

Simply asking your customers for referrals or people they know who can also use your product or service is a great place to start.
Making sure you acknowledge and reward the referral senders will naturally grow the amount of referrals you receive. People will enjoy helping you and when you acknowledge and appreciate them and will in turn help you more.
Staying top of mind with your customers, prospects, and referral sources will generate more business and referrals for you. You can do this by calling, emailing, sending greeting cards, and newsletters. Staying top of mind is customers and prospects is about creating a relationship.

The best referral and follow up system I have seen and used for years is SendOutCards. When used correctly you can create an explosion of referrals with very little effort. The reason for this is SendOutCards is a great system and once set up can go on autopilot. You can learn more about SendOutCards and how it might work for you by visiting this site. Fill out the contact information and I will call and talk to you about it personally.

Whether you use index cards, Excel, Outlook, SendOutCards, Act!, Goldmine, Saleceforce.com, or any of the many other CRM tools on the market the important thing is you use one. Commit to a system, spend the time to get it set up to work for your business, and then use it no matter what! The benefits of using your referral and follow up system will outweigh any time or pain you might feel getting it started!

So tell me, what system do you have? What are you doing to increase your referrals and follow up with your clients and prospects?

Follow Up Strategies: Two Days Before Christmas

Alan Underkofler — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 17:57:32 +0000

This morning I had a completely different post in mind. I was going to write about sending books to your top clients and referral sources for the New Year. In thinking about follow up this morning I decided to write about a simple and highly effective follow up strategy for the two days before Christmas.

Take a look at your top 25 clients and referral sources for the year, print out a report or simply write them down. Once you have them pick up the phone and call each one. Call them and wish them a Merry Christmas. If you are not sure if they celebrate Christmas wish them a Happy Holliday weekend. Thank these clients and referral sources for the business and referrals from the past year. Ask them what they are doing for the holiday. In general you want to touch them right before the holiday. Don’t ask for new business or referrals, just thank them and wish them a great holiday.

You may not be able to reach everyone as I am sure some have already taken the week off, so just leave a message or a voicemail. It may seem simple because it is! These simple touches build your relationships with your clients and referral sources. By doing this simple task you are showing your clients and referral sources that you care about them and appreciate them.

It’s a bit difficult for me to call you and wish you a Merry Christmas and a happy holiday weekend! Please know that I appreciate you for taking the time to visit my blog and I truly appreciate the many emails and comments I receive from my posts. I wish for you a wonderful holiday filled with great moments which create lasting memories.

Do You Still Need to Send Your Holiday Cards?

Alan Underkofler — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 19:34:22 +0000

You still have time to get this important follow up strategy completed! However at this point you are a bit limited on how you can get this done. One way is to make a mad rush to the store and buy boxes of holiday cards only to spend today and most of the weekend writing them out. I must say the thought of you actually doing thing is making me tired! I know as I have done this so many times in the past! I am sure if you have not yet sent your holiday cards you know you need to and have just been procrastinating to the very last minute!

Don’t worry! You have another option available to you which will allow you to send all of your holiday cards within a few hours. Whether you need to send 100 or 2,000 holiday cards you still have time to get it done! It all starts with having access to a powerful system called SendOutCards!

SendOutCards is a very simple online tool which allows you to upload all of your addresses, choose a holiday card from over 1,000 choices, type out a nice holiday message, and with a few clicks send to your entire database! Your cards are then printed, stuffed in envelopes with a real stamp, and placed in the mail the next day! The best part is you can actually send the same holiday card to 500 customers and prospects and then go back and write additional messages to your top 25 customers and prospects to make them more personal. This means no customer or prospect is forgotten! SendOutCards also allows you to add gifts to your cards! So if you should be sending a little something extra to those top clients you are covered! To learn more about this tool visit SendOutCards and click on the top banner to send a free card and get the tour.

There is just no other service on the market that can do this with such ease! I have used this service for the past few years for holiday cards as well as all the different business greeting card occasions with great success. This is not just a holiday card tool!

If you happen to be one of those thinking “it’s too late to send holiday cards at this point” or “does sending holiday cards really make a difference in my business?”, I would encourage you to consider recent research by Hallmark: Hallmark found that businesses say they use greeting cards as a “kind of investment in their business… They’re investing in customer relationship with the hopes that it will pay back”. The company has conducted research that found at least half of customers who received holiday cards from businesses say they are more likely to continue doing business with that company versus another one. You can read more on this by reading the article in the Washington Post.

So the question to ask yourself is not whether you should send holiday cards or not… The question is whether you want your current customers to continue doing business with you!