In the totally over saturated world of marketing, how can you connect directly with your key consumers?

  • Email marketing open rates are on a major decline.
  • Traditional and targeted online ad click throughs are almost non-existent.
  • Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Shazam and every other social media are targeted but unqualified mass discussions.

So how about stepping back in time and actually connecting directly to your customers through an actual hand written personal message delivered direct to them…

say what connects

We recently applied this strategy with Eastwood. The process is a page out of “customer service 101” and we have instilled the task to the last person to touch the product before it is delivered to the consumer. It is the responsibility of the technicians who set up the guitars and pack them. After each set-up the guitar techs write a note on a postcard checking in with the customer on how their guitar is and making sure that it living up to their expectations and they sign their name. The postcards are then put into a pile for mailing out three weeks after the delivery of the guitar. This takes the techs all of 2 minutes, but instills a personal touch that no other guitar company in the world is doing.

This extra two minutes of connecting with the end user is not a sales call, it is a personal connection that demonstrates that Eastwood cares. It also reinforces the Eastwood brand and that customers are important. This is a simple and inexpensive branding tool that can go a long way in showing how you are different than your competitors.

One morning as I went looking through my snail mail, I came across a hand addressed letter to me. Inside, was a nice greeting card and a hand written note thanking me and my team for being a part of the Movember fundraising for men’s health. MovemberThe note had details about the accomplishments of our team and my previous Movember involvement and was signed by the Toronto organizers… this amazed me, as I was just one of over a million participants in Canada. The impact of this simple card put me to rallying a team over the next two years of Movembers to raising more funds and exposure for the cause.

When was the last time you received an actual note from one of your favourite brands? Not an automated email or a database driven merged marketing piece… but a note written by a human, who knew something about you and your loyalty to their brand? My guess is probably never. The potential of a personalized hand written note is amazing and will not go unnoticed and it will help to put you to the top position in brand awareness.

In one of my recent Seneca College Graphic Design classes, I took a survey of 90 of my second year marketing students and not one of them had ever wrote or sent a hand written letter… that in itself showed a huge opportunity. I explained to my class that a simple follow up note I sent after an interview when I was just one month out of college turned into my first full time design job because of the power of the note. To demonstrate this, I sent my class on cold calls to marketing departments and branding agencies across the Toronto area and told them to follow up with a personal note mailed to the person they met with. The majority of students didn’t get it and instead sent a generic thank you email and got no response… but for the 10% that did “go back in time” and sent a snail mail note, most of them ended up with second opportunities to revisit and some landed internships!

When was the last time you connected directly to your customers?  

Cheers grant

Grant Ivens, RGD brand surgeon | rocket scientist
Say What! Communications Corp.
116A Main Street North, Markham, ON, Canada L3P 1X8
T 905.752.3110 grant@saywhat.com
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