Random musings: Turning contacts into raving fans

This blog post will be fairly SendOutCards centric.

How do you use SendOutCards to turn contacts into raving fans?

1. Put your contacts into a contact manager. SOC has an excellent contact manager that you can get for free with a free SOC account. Just go to new.sendoutcards.com/144087 and click on the green Join link in the upper right hand corner, select Customer, then click on Join Now. Select the Pay As You Go Customer radio button, keep the default of No Points and then select None at this time under Add Expense Funds. Click next to fill in your contact info. You now have a fully functional SendOutCards account absolutely free! You'll want to upload all of your contacts to your new contact manager and then create groups to sort your contacts into.

2. Not all of your contacts will be prospects for your business, but you want to be sure that you include a group for prospects. I've read that you lose 10% of your influence for each month that you don't have contact with somebody. It's never too late to reach out to someone, but if it's been awhile (such as when your only contact was getting somebody's business card at a networking event a year or two ago), you'll need to basically start over. There are several ways to reach out to someone: texting, phone calls, social media, face-to-face meetings or greeting cards and gifts. Use one or more of these methods to reach out. But the key is to build the relationship over building the business. Use the Pareto Principle, you know the 80-20 rule. 80% of your contacts need to be strictly about building the relationship…absolutely zero mention of business. Since people do business with people that they know, like and trust, if you properly build the relationship, some of your contacts will do business with you.

3. Now that someone has become a customer, you must continue keeping in contact with them. As I mentioned yesterday 68% of customers leave because of perceived indifference. But you must still maintain your 80-20 ratio. But how do you do this? There are several occasions to reach out to someone:

Thank you - Thank you's are usually a response to a particular event, such as thank you for meeting with me, thanks for buying my widget or thank you for inviting me to your event
Birthday - Everybody has one. Send them a card. Send their spouse a card. If they have kids at home, send their kids a card. And don't forget their pets!
Holiday - Most people celebrate one of the winter holidays (Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa). You can send out a generic holiday card, but if you know which holiday they celebrate you can create a group for that holiday, place everybody in the proper group and send a card to that group. But if you want to stand out, send a card for another holiday such as Thanksgiving or New Year. Or maybe Arbor Day. Or Groundhog Day.
Recognition - Thanks to Facebook, it's much easier to know when someone is celebrating a birthday. Or when they get a new job or promotion at work. Or their kid graduates from high school or college. Send a card.
Gratitude - Gratitude is more generic than a thank you. Gratitude is thank you for being a customer. Or thank you for being a friend. Or thank you for being you.
Lifestyle and celebration - Again, thanks to FB, you'll know when somebody moves, has a new baby in the family (including fur babies), takes a nice vacation, etc.
Marketing and promotion - Now you can send a card (or text) about your next sale. Or your business expanding. Or your interview in the Wall Street Journal. Or asking for a referral. All of the other ways of keeping touch are about them. This is the only time that it's about you

4. Many of your customers will now become referral machines for you. These new referrals can then be added to your contact manager and the cycle starts all over again.

SendOutCards has many different kinds of cards and some of them are better suited to certain purposes.

Postcard - unless you're sending a vacation "The weather is beautiful, wish you were here" card, postcards are best suited to marketing and promotion.

Standard 2 panel cards are useful as a relationship tool. Basically everything but marketing and promotion.

A 3 panel card is great as a mini-brochure for marketing and promotion.

A big card is for when you want to make a big impact and are good for any purpose.

That's an awful lot of cards and it sounds like a lot of work, but SendOutCards can help with that. SOC offers several ways to send a card.

SCSA - Single card to a single address. This is the way most people send a card. You pick a card and send it to someone. This is still a great way to send a recognition card or maybe a lifestyle and celebration card, or any unique event

The other ways of sending cards are known as campaigns

SCGA - Single card to a group of addresses. Use your groups to send a card to everyone in your group, whether it's a holiday card or a notification of a sale. And you can use the SOC contact manager mail merge feature to personalize your cards

MCSA - Multiple cards to a single address. You can setup a series of cards to go out at specific times, such as a nice to meet you card when you first meet someone, a birthday card can be scheduled to automatically go out a week before someone's birthday, a holiday card can be scheduled to go out automatically. and finally you might schedule some marketing and promotional pieces to be sent out

MCGA - I'm sure that you've guessed that this is multiple cards to a group of addresses. This is similar to MCSA but sent to a group instead of an individual

Often the MCSA is used as a follow up campaign, i.e. a nice to meet you campaign or a thanks for buying my widget campaign, while a MCGA campaign is used in a stay in touch campaign to your customers or prospects

If you need any help setting up your SOC account or sending cards or campaigns, let me know.