Do Your Customers Ever Think About You?

5 January, 2009, 8:00 am

Let’s be realistic, you think about them all the time.  are they coming to your site?  Are they shopping your competitors? Are you the first company / person they think of when they need something you offer?

So it’s fair to say they are on your mind. If you aren’t thinking about them, then you OUGHT to be, and maybe that is a topic for another post.  For now we want to consider if they are thinking of you, and how you can help them to think of you more often.

In the old days of print media, I remember refrigerator calendars.  We had at least half a dozen magnetic wallet size calendars hanging from our refrigerator when I was a kid.  These always had the names of insurance agents, local drug stores, and Realtors on them.  This guaranteed that all year long, if we needed any of their services they would be the first folks we would think of.

These days it isn’t that easy.  All the magnets on my refrigerator are years old; they are pretty much obscured by the scribblings of my three year old.  If I need a calendar I will always turn to my google calendar, not dig around on the fridge.  So we need to think of ways to stay in front of of network that are relevant and useful.  This assures that when they need our service, they will think first of us.

Some of these are simple like put a signature file with a web address in your outgoing emails.  We should be doing this anyway, but let’s go another step or two.

Acknowledge Birthdays in your network

simpsonbdayI don’t know why I hadn’t taken the time to do this earlier, but I finally set up a birthday system.

Facebook and other social networks will always let you know when your friend’s birthdays are.  I just imported all my facebook contacts into sendible, now I get an email the day before everyone’s birthday.

Then I went to my gmail account and turned on canned responses (you can find this in the gmail labs (look for the green beaker at the top right if you don’t know that).

With canned responses you can write several messages and then just send them out.  This saves time if you retype the same message over again for similar circumstances.

I saved a Happy Birthday email.  Now, when one of my contacts has a birthday, it’s a few clicks to send them a happy birthday message.  Sure, they get a lot of those on their birthday, but not as many as you might think.  I just had a birthday last month, and I still remember the services and providers who stood above the fold on that day.

By the way, this is also an easy way to import contacts from facebook into gmail.  Since Gmail still doesn’t allow that feature, its a couple a day that you can add to your gmail contacts.  Once they are there, they are there forever.  What is it they say about two birds and a rock?

Branding Yourselfbranding

Do you use a brand image?  When a person brands cattle they burn their image permanently into the skin of the animal.  When you are branding you want to burn your image permanently into the minds of your clients.

Is that image in everything you send?  For me, I use my face.  That stupid smirking guy looking out at you from the top of this page, that’s my image.  Sure I suppose it could be better, but the friend who took the picture is an exceptional photographer and she did her best.

The point is, everywhere you see me, you see that image.  Are you consistent?  Are you recognizable?  are you present?

A song I used to like alot was about a young girls funeral.  It was a terribly sad song, with a profound point.  One of the lines of the chorus was “words aren’t remembered, presence is.”  This is true, not only of funerals, but of everything.  People won’t remember what you say, but they will remember if you were there.  Remember that big debacle a few years ago about Ford and Firestone?  Apparently tires were blowing up and killing people, or something to that effect.  But we are still buying both aren’t we?  They survived the controversy and now, in most people’s minds “they are one of the best, because they have always been there.”

Even if the only thing that can keep a major company around is a government bailout, people don’t remember that as much as they remember that they have been around.  The brand means everything.  Longevity and presence sell more than you can imagine.

So when it comes to presence, are you a member of facebook or are you an active contributor to the community?  members are barely present, contributors are always there and everybody knows them.

So what will you do this year to make sure your customers think about you?

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