Marketing Tip of the Week: Communicating with your customers part 1

This week and next week, we will focus on communicating with customers. This is one of the most important things you can do in marketing-- you need to stay in the minds of your customers.

Tom Reber tells a great story about when he owned a painting company. He had a client he worked with for years, painting her whole house. He drove by her house once and saw someone else painting the outside of her house. He called her to see why she had not called him and she said " I didn't know you painted the outside too."   He had not communicated regularly with her to let her know his full scope of services.

I reach out to customers three ways. Two we will cover this week, and the third next week.

Personalized Note Cards

These are very simple and allow me to write handwritten thank yous to customers for each job we do. I designed them and bought them from www.vistaprint.com. It was very easy to do and they look great. They are shown above

We send notes out twice: First, when people sign on for an install or rebuild, they get a thank you for your patience card if they have to wait more than a week. Then everyone gets a thank you upon job completion.

Weekly Pond Tips

We send these out to our water feature customers every week. I do them in MailChimp. You can create multiple mailing lists in MailChimp with any CSV file (can be created in Excel). Most CRM (customer relationship management) tools allow you to export files via CSV or Excel.

My pond tips are short and touch on something new every week. During the busy season it's easier to come up with things to talk about. I talk about pond cleanings, things to know about fish, and how often you should feed your fish. It's more challenging in the winter, but still so important to stay in the minds of your customers. I spent January focusing on fish information. Koi versus goldfish, etc.

Here's what a customer told us last week... "Your tips are the best! I read them every week and must admit that after 10 or so years with a pond still learn something regularly." People love these tips! Here's a link to an AquaReale pond tip,

Next week we will address monthly newsletters.

If you are like my husband and could NEVER do these tips yourself, think about hiring Pondtent to do it for you!   Or if you have the time and interest to do these yourselves, go for it! Send me your examples!

For more information, visit www.mypondtent.com