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Matt Swope suggested printing Thank You’s and Reminders.
Lets analyze this for a moment.Thank you and reminder cards are a great idea, but they increase our cost and reduce our profits. The paper, ink or printing, and the STAMP cost us money. IT IS GOING TO COST US A QUARTER TO MAIL EACH POST CARD, and ALMOST 40 cents TO MAIL A LETTER.
Mailing these to a few hundred clients each year adds up to several hundred dollars per year in U.S. POSTAGE.Our new program has a space for client email.
Why not add a “button” in the program to send an email “Thank You” or “Reminder” to them instead?I don’t know about you, but I’m all for putting a few hundred dollars in my pocket, INSTEAD of “Uncle Sam’s”. đź’ˇ
Rick, I feel it would be difficult, or time consuming, to obtain a large percentage of customer e-mail addresses, therefore, creating an inconvienent mailing system. Some US mail, others e-mail. I do agree with the e-mail cost savings.
I have over 3 years of experience in Internet marketing so I will speak up. Although I agree with you that emailing customers is very inexpensive, I do not think that it should be used as a primary means. People do not like being emailed unless they are friends or family of yours. Not to mention that most people probably won’t give out their email addy anyway. Even if you do go with emailing as a primary contact, you must ensure that you have the right format and content in your email or it may not even get to the customer.
Example: When I was sending out emails to my customers (non HB company) on one occasion, I found out that over 95% of my emails where not reaching the target email addy because of one single word in my text. A lot of ISP’s have spam filters in place to prevent spammers from filling up people’s email box and yes it does occasionally take out some legitimate emails.
As far as the content goes; note that there are dozens of email programs, (i.e. Yahoo, Hotmail, Outlook, Mozilla, Pegasus) and being able to format your email so that it isn’t distorted can be challenging, especially if you are creating it in html format. I’m sure everyone has received an email where you couldn’t read the content or it was html gibberish. That is because some email programs process and display emails differently or slightly different.
Email is very easy to do and letter mailings are time consuming and expensive, however it is my belief that the customer will appreciate it more to see that you’ve taken the effort to sent out a “thank you” or kindly “reminder” cards to them. I currently have a customer database of about 700 and it cost me about $320 (paper, stamps, ink) to send out my quarterly newsletter but I know that all I need to do is book 2 jobs to break even from this expense. The first 2 quarterly newsletters I sent out I books 5 and 7 jobs respectfully. Thank You and Reminder cards should show an even better ROI.
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