Remember your customers.

As Valentines Day quickly approaches, I realize I missed a few days last year like Fathers Day. I though it would be a good time to remind ourselves that besides saying I Love You to our significant others on Valentines Day and Thank You to our Dads on the third Sunday in June, we also needed to remember to thank our customers.

In today's economic climate, many people are cutting back on sales gifts and thank you cards as a cost saving measure. This is the wrong place to start cutting costs. Our customers are the people that pay us and therefore feed us. We need to remember them, and remember to thank them for their support and business.


The consumer electronics or CE business is down upwards of 60% in the U.S. Some estimates are as high as 74% for the custom markets this quarter. It isn't hard to imagine these numbers for me since our business has been off nearly 50% as well. Imagine that, we are off nearly 50% when Circuit City, Tweeter and a whole list of custom installers in our area have locked the doors or moved on to other endeavors. Even with a 50% reduction in sales, we are surviving. We are working out agreements with banks on business loans, looking for new investors that may want equity so we can shed those loans, keeping our vehicles another year or so and finding other ways to cut overhead.

The one place we haven't cut is saying Thank You to our customers. You can do it for free with a phone call, or reasonably inexpensive with a simple card. I tried e-cards for a while and got a couple of comments, nothing really positive. Then a few months ago a builder I work with introduced me to Send Out Cards. Send Out Cards is an on-line based technology that lets me send a real card in my writing. I just fill out the card on line and it shows up at my customer a few days later. The response has been excellent.

All I had to do was fill out two handwriting cards and they used those cards to digitize my writing and create a personal font. With thousands of cards to choose from, and the ability to insert pictures, the cards have become a very unique tool in our customer engagement efforts. Our response and compliment rate is about 3 times higher than the old stock thank you cards and several fold higher than the e-card response.

For the truth in advertising section, Send Out Cards is a network marketing business. You can do like my builder friend and I did and buy a dealer kit, or you can just buy a retail kit. You can create a business helping others improve theirs or get a great tool to improve yours. Besides that, it reminds me of Fathers day, and any birthday including clients that I put in the system, we could all use a little help with that.

This is the time to get very creative in engaging your customers, maintaining quality while reducing your costs. Don't let flat be your new up. Push ahead and start with the customers who already know you.