A Personal Note to Your Existing Clients

All of us are excit­ed about the new ways we can mar­ket our ser­vices via the web and email: writ­ing blogs, email newslet­ters, Face­book and more. How­ev­er, some­times it is good to try the old tra­di­tion­al way of mar­ket­ing like writ­ing a per­son­al let­ter to your clients. Instead of design­ing your month­ly or quar­ter­ly newslet­ter this fall, try out my sug­ges­tion. Write an update about your com­pa­ny that is per­son­al and tru­ly down to earth. Your clients hired you in the begin­ning because they liked you, not your logo, your trucks or brand­ing: though that may have caused them to be inter­est­ed. They liked the per­son behind the brand! They felt com­fort­able that you and your team would do a good job on their home. There­fore, write them an update on how you and your team are doing. Tell them what you’ve been up to late­ly, any major changes you’ve made in your per­son­al or busi­ness life such as ​“I just ran the Boston Marathon for the first time!” or ​“My old­est son just grad­u­at­ed from the Naval Acad­e­my…” etc. Don’t try to sell your ser­vices. Just write like you would to a friend and see what hap­pens! I spoke to a paint­ing client who tried this ​“tech­nique” out when he start­ed a new paint­ing busi­ness. He had bro­ken up a part­ner­ship and start­ed a brand new paint­ing busi­ness and still had a small client list of over 100 peo­ple. He wrote a very sim­ple let­ter telling them about his new com­pa­ny with­out try­ing to sell him­self. With­in days, he had 11 leads and closed 8 jobs! Not bad for spend­ing less than $200 on stamps and a cou­ple hours of time! My father’s com­pa­ny, Chism Broth­ers Paint­ing, just recent­ly did some­thing sim­i­lar. Instead of send­ing out their nor­mal fall newslet­ter, they wrote a reg­u­lar-old let­ter that gave their clients an update on their com­pa­ny and fam­i­ly life. 48 hours after peo­ple received the let­ter, Mike Chism (own­er) had 4 qual­i­ty paint­ing leads from very good clients. He then received sev­er­al emails thank­ing him for send­ing the let­ter and sang his prais­es for being such a great ser­vice com­pa­ny. One cus­tomer even told him she had made changes in her busi­ness and cus­tomer ser­vice depart­ment because of how he treat­ed his clients! Wow! So, try send­ing out a well-writ­ten let­ter, fold it up, stick it in a blank #10 enve­lope (with no win­dow), type or hand-write your cus­tomers address, stick a stamp on it…and send it out! The time and cost is well worth it. Your clients will not be offend­ed and will fill like part of the family!