One of the easiest ways to boost your sales is to sell to your existing customers. However, simply providing an excellent product isn’t always enough to keep your customers coming back again and again.
If you want your customers to do business with you again – you need to be reminding them!
A letter I got in the mail the other day caught my eye – it was from a car mechanic who has got their ‘customer reminding system’ down pat. Being from a car mechanic caught me by surprise. I would expect a follow up letter from the more ‘white-collar’ businesses, such as the letters I get from my mortgage broker, or the follow up offers I get from all sorts of banks.
But it’s not something I would expect from my car mechanic – and I wonder if it’s even more powerful as a result.
Here’s a little background on my history with this mechanic. I gave them a shot a while back when they were down the road from my place – my regular mechanic had relocated into town, and the ability to just drop my car down the road for a service is what won me over. They did a great job, and provided me with more information on my car than my regular mechanic, but I didn’t really intend going back.
About 5 months later, I get a letter from my new mechanic reminding me my car is due for a service soon. This is something I’ve never got from my regular mechanic, and I’m usually pretty slack getting my car serviced. I was planning on going back to my regular mechanic, but this new mechanic has got me – they’re making it easy for me to do business with them.
So one letter = a service they wouldn’t have otherwise got.
Anyway, since that last service I’ve moved suburbs. True to form, I got another reminder letter – if I hadn’t have got my car fixed up a couple of weeks before they might have got me again. So this time it didn’t work, but if circumstances were different, it might have.
The process wasn’t finished there, however. A week before my service was ‘due’, I got another reminder letter. I got another letter a few days after my service was ‘due’, reminding me again, as well as telling me a few reasons why it is important my car gets serviced regularly. If I were thinking of missing a service – this letter would have made me think twice.
Finally, the letter that prompted me to post turned up the other day. It briefly said we noticed I haven’t brought my car in for a while, and offered me a $25 discount if I came in within the next 7 days. If I was holding off on a service because I was short on cash, well this letter might have got me in.
I think this latest letter is probably the last in their sequence, but I guess I’ll find out soon enough. Either way, this mailing sequence has already got this mechanic one extra service from me, and if I hadn’t have moved, I’m pretty sure they would have locked me in as a customer for a long time.
Let’s take a quick look at the situations where they’ve set themselves up to make an extra sale:
- If their customers forget their upcoming service – they remind them,
- If their customers are holding off on a service because they’re short on cash – the discount might sway them, and
- If their customers are thinking where to go for their next service – the letters can keep the mechanic in their customers minds.
What are you doing in your business to remind your customers to do business with you?
About Tristan