Priority #1 - Capturing Your Customer's Name
I love my customers. You should too. In fact, when they come in your door, you should be turning cartwheels and jump up and down, figuratively speaking that is. When a brand new referred customer walks in the door, it means you won't have to spend one hundred dollars of your hard earned money on useless advertising. Drive bys and referrals Ninety percent of my new business is drive-bys, referrals and internet. The other ten percent comes from my yellow page ad. I rarely spend any money on direct advertising for new customers except for the yellow page ad. Here's Why: Most of your business will come from your repeat EXISTING customer and the referrals they send to you. So How Do You Get Your Existing Customer To Come Back Again And Again? Your Most Important TIP - Capture the new customer's name, address, city, zip and phone number accurately when they first appear in your store for a custom framing purchase and later send them a direct, response letter. And you do this over and over again. When you do a direct mail offer to your existing customer base at least three to six times a year, it can bring in more sales than you can imagine. And the momentum builds from those mailings. Some customers will give you a company name, because they may want to write off the framing purchase on their tax return as an expenditure for their office. That's OK. When you start to write up the invoice, the customer will say, "Oh, just put that under my company name". NO. You will not just put it under the company name. You'll say back to the customer, "Yes, I'll do that, but I need your first and last name FIRST! We need a human being's name for the computer". Just make sure that you get the customer's first and last name on the first line of your invoice, then the company name and everything else comes after that. TIP: You want the customer's first and last name because when you send a mailing to that customer at the company address without the customer's name at the top, guess where your letter will go? You got it!...the forbidden circular trash file. Why do you want to capture every customer's name? Because every customer's name is like a bar of gold and you're Fort Knox.
 When you capture your customer's name you don't have to go out and pan for gold in the stream. It's already at your doorstep waiting for you to take it. How much easier can it get? 
|
|
|
OK, so I get carried away with this capturing the name thing. You will too when you find out how many thousands of extra dollars it puts in your pocket when you market to your existing customer base. TIP: Don't waste your time or money seeking new customers. TIP: Work your existing customers with direct mail marketing and you'll have all the money and referrals you want. Referrals ARE new customers. The only difference between a new customer you spend money advertising to get and a referral is the word FREE. Referrals are free. Every picture you frame is like a large calling card on someone's wall. "Inch by inch..." When someone sees your frame on a friend's wall and asks who did it, your name will pop up and that will stick in that person's mind when they want to frame their picture. This is how you build your goodwill. One person at a time. How to set up your customer base: • The best way to capture your customer's name is on your computer. Unless you have a framer's software package installed on your shop computer, you'll have to do double entry. This means you'll take the customer's name from the hand written invoice and transfer it into your computer. There are mailing list programs you can use to do this. If you're using a picture framers software for your business this will include a mailing list in it. You can use Quick Books Pro for your accounting and use the built in customer data base in that program to do your mailings. And there are other software accounting packages that allow you to build your customer data base. • Another way is by hand, either by saving an office copy of your invoice or transferring the customers name to a 3 x 5 card. This is cave man method. Especially when you consider you already have a computer or you wouldn't be reading this now. Use your resources that you have at hand. You don't have to go out and buy a dedicated computer for your customer list. Always be sure to ask your customer for their zip code. When you do a mailing, the post office will demand it be placed on every letter, whether by hand or machine or even bar coded. (Most mailing programs allow bar coding). You may have only 20 customers names that you have captured. You may have 200. Soon you will have 2000 and more. I used to do all my mailing by hand in the shop. I would gather a couple of the staff around and we would stuff, lick and stamp for a couple hours. Or you could hire a high school kid to do all this. Now, all my mailings are done through a mailing house. The mailing house even picks up the finished mail out project from the printer and within two or three days, it's done and at the post office ready for distribution. Everything is done through a couple of phone calls. All you do is prepare a check for the mailing house for the postage and of course their fee for the service. Every mailing house charges a little differently. Shop around. Here's how to make sure all your letters get delivered by the Post Office department:
Next >>
| 
The Ultimate Guide
