Latitude 53

How many marketing emails do you receive every day?  How many of them do you open?  We are increasingly bombarded with email communications as the technology for mass emailing becomes cheaper and more widely available.  More and more small businesses are using auto-responder technology to communicate with their contact database.

Emails typically have a short shelf-life.  We open them (sometimes), we read them (occasionally) and then they sit in our inbox quickly disappearing off the bottom of the screen.

A greeting card is now a way for small business to differentiate themselves from their competition.  Think of it as a planned programme of highly personal marketing.  You want cards to go to your key clients on a regular basis.  If you add value to the card in some way – a set of hints/tips inside or something that ties in with your customers’ interests (e.g. sporting fixtures – see our quarterly sports cards and World Cup cards for examples).

Having something of value inside the card creates longevity.  In other words the card will sit on your customer’s desk for weeks or months – ideally until the next one arrives.  In this way you can keep your company in the minds of your customers for pretty much the whole year.

For more information about how to introduce greeting cards into your marketing and make this work for your business call Andrew Helm on 0844 504 5353.  Visit our website at www.latitude53.co.uk.

Find out about our brand new service!

Let us look after your customer database and do the mail out for you.  In many cases our personal approach to marketing will generate you more business AND SAVE YOU MONEY.

Call us to find out more 0844 504 5353.

One of our newest customers has had a fascinating outcome from using our cards to send to her customers.  Joanne Clayton runs Data Bubble Consultancy Ltd who supply accurate and targeted data to charities and businesses for marketing.  She bought our cards to say thank you to her clients for doing business with her.  Here’s what happened after the cards went out.  Over to Joanne..

Joanne Clayton

“A few days after the cards started going out I started getting calls from the people who had received them saying how pleased they felt to receive them.  The fact that they called me completely changed the dynamic of the phone call.

As well as giving me the opportunity to ask if everything was OK with the data provided, I was also able to offer additional services to a more receptive audience.

If I had made the call it would have been more difficult to sell as the customer would identify it as a deliberate sales call.  It’s making it much much easier for me to generate repeat business!”

For more information about Data Bubble call Joanne Clayton on 01274 483936 or visit www.databubble.info

To learn more about how greeting cards can drive up repeat and referral business call Andrew Helm on 0844 504 5353 or visit our website www.latitude53.co.uk

2009 was an awfully difficult trading year for a lot of businesses.  However, despite the longest sustained period of negative economic growth on record, 2010 looks to be a whole lot better.

What have you been doing with respect to marketing during 2009?  Have you been talking to your best, most-valued customers?  Businesses that continue to invest during a recession emerge more strongly during the upturn.  During the 80s, Burger King and MacDonalds had similar market shares.  MacDonalds marketed more aggressively during the 80s recession and the legacy of that MacDonalds continues to have a higher market share thank Burger King.

If you’ve been neglecting your customers during 2009 it’s not too late.  The new year represents a great time to send a card to your most valued customers.  There are two reasons to make a connection at this time:

1. It allows you to thank your customers for sticking with you during a difficult year; and
2. You can let your customers know that you are still trading i.e. that you were not a victim of the recession!

A card and a stamp will cost about £1.20-£1.30 and the value of the sentiment will be worth a whole lot more in repeat and referral business.

Start your programme of personalised marketing with branded greeting cards now!

Visit Latitude 53’s online shop to place your order.  Order and pay online – delivery within 7 working days.

For more hints, tips and ideas about how to use greeting cards as part of your marketing mix visit our website.

Team Trades is different.  As Team Trades’ Phil Jarvis says:

“We want to communicate with our customers and continue the relationship once the work is complete.  It goes without saying that after every large commission we offer a complimentary follow up: but we feel it’s about more than that.

We find that cards work really well. Giving people all the detail that they need about the business and what services we offer. It’s great to have something to hand that people will keep and hopefully refer to time and time again.

We want to let customers know what we’re up to and how our business is changing.  It’s about letting them know what we can do for them, their families, neighbours and friends.

That’s why we have decided to create a newsletter.  It will be informative and give our customers some useful hints and tips, such as seasonal maintenance jobs they may want to consider around the home or office.

We hope our clients will find the newsletter useful and informative, and we will welcome their feedback.  You never know, we may feature the work  we have done for them in a future edition.”

For more information on Team Trades contact Phil Jarvis on 0800 077 6171 or visit their website at www.teamtrades.co.uk

For more information on using greeting cards as part of a customer retention strategy call Andrew Helm at Latitude 53 on 0844 504 5353 or visit www.latitude53.co.uk/cards4business

In the 21st Century, it is easy to assume that everyone with whom you are seeking to communicate has access to email.  Promotional offers to customers increasingly require that the beneficiary has an email address to download a voucher.  But what if your target audience does not universally have access to email and/or the internet?

Barbara Dinsdale runs a health-screening service and is currently seeking specifically to target the over 50s with a one-stop-shop health screen for diabetes, blood pressure and cholesterol.  Over to Barbara…

“Whilst our health-screening is offered to people of all ages, we realise that blood-pressure and cholesterol in particular are more significant concerns for older people.  We were aware that there are older people out there using the internet – the so-called ‘Silver Surfers’ – but when we looked into the statistics we were shocked at the extent to which older people are still excluded from what we might term the digital age.

The Office of National Statistics (ONS) states that over 9 million people in the UK aged over 55 are excluded from computers and internet.  The total number of over 55s is just over 15m so that means that, still, 60% of the UK’s over 55s do not have access to technology.  For us, in trying to talk to this market, we need to go back to more traditional means of communication.  Email promotions will only have limited value.

The strategy we are taking forward is to use direct, personalized mail with telephone follow up calls.  Speaking directly to people allows us to offer alternative dates and venues and allows people to ask any questions they may have.  We are also looking to use cards as a method of sending out the annual reminder.  A light, humorous touch in the cards we believe helps to remove some of the stress from what is a potentially serious medical subject.  We expect to pick up significant business through word-of-mouth and so making our clients feel comfortable with us is central to our marketing efforts.  We are certainly looking as we go forward to using some form of thankyou card to all of our new customers.”

For more information on Barbara’s health-screening services visit www.health-yourself-screens.com or call Barbara on 01274-688774.

For more information on using greeting cards as part of your marketing and customer loyalty strategies visit www.latitude53.co.uk/cards4business or call Andrew Helm on 0844 504 5353.

The Role of Highly Personal Communication in Business

You might think that in this electronic age there is no place for the traditional greeting card in business.  Gradually we have come to see electronic cards (e-cards) used for ‘personal’ communication.  Furthermore, technology is allowing more and more smaller businesses to harness powerful e-marketing tools to send out e-newsletters and e-flyers to large numbers of people in their contacts databases.

I’m not here to argue against the use of the latest communication technologies as I believe that they offer small businesses enormous power both to operate in a professional-looking manner and grow their business.  What concerns me however is that in seeking to behave and be perceived as a larger corporate entity, small-businesses are neglecting two of their basic inherent advantages:

• that they have the ability to offer a personal level of service that one doesn’t typically get from a larger corporate; and
• that they can operate with an attention to detail and customer need that, again, is generally beyond the capabilities of larger businesses.

I’m not a marketing expert but I have picked up a few telling statistics on my journey through running my own business.

• Two-thirds of people who switch suppliers do so through ‘indifference’.  They simply don’t feel like a valued customer and go elsewhere.
• Figures vary but it can cost up to ten times as much to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one.

For small-businesses, the cost of acquiring new customers and clients can be crippling.  It’s far less painful to build a marketing strategy based upon customer retention and referral.  In other words if you’ve done a great job for someone, make sure that they come back to you next time and that they tell all their friends about the great service they received.  This is exactly the competitive advantage that small business have – they can engage with their customers at a personal level in a way that larger business cannot.

The most famous example of customer retention through personal communication?

The single biggest inspiration for me in setting up the greeting card business was a story I heard about an American car dealer.  His name is Joe Girard and he is credited as being the world’s greatest ever salesman.  It is often quoted in marketing literature as a great example of customer retention.  Paraphrasing the story, it goes along the lines of…

The dealer realised that he was in a market where he had huge potential for repeat business.  After all, people tend to replace their cars every few years.  He knew that if he could keep in touch with his customers once they had bought from him, there would be a very good chance that they would buy from him again.  So, what he did was found reasons to send them a personal card every few months for 3-4 years.  His name, face and business were constantly infront of people.  What happened was that he achieved massive levels of repeat business and not only that, he found he was getting good levels of referral business as his customers were talking about his cards to their family and friends.

The car dealer was operating in a sector with two key attributes:

• a high potential for repeat business (upgrades, replacements etc);
• relatively high sale transaction value.

The latter particularly makes sending personal communications more cost-effective.  If you are in a sector with low transaction value it is much less, or not, cost-effective to invest the time and effort to communicate in a highly personal way (here the e-flyer or e-newsletter is typically more appropriate).

Greeting Cards in Business in 2009

Despite the developments in technology to which I referred at the start of this article, greeting cards continue to be used widely in the United States.  The practice of sending cards to customers has never really caught on in the UK.  This may be because British people are concerned about being ‘over familiar’, don’t like the ‘touchy feelie’ nature of sending cards or just don’t see the value in it.

Of course the key thing is to communicate sensitively – don’t go bombarding people with cards or they may start to see it as an irritation.  Do it sensibly and try to add value wherever possible.  In this way it becomes more than just a card it becomes something that people look forward to receiving as they know it will contain something thoughtful, useful or practical.

Remember that a large proportion of smaller businesses trade on personal service.  In other words you are as much buying the person as the business.  This is particularly true for independent consultants, coaches and smaller firms in the business support sector (accountants, lawyers, recruitment firms and so on).  I believe you can and should find some way to include an amount of highly personalised communication in your marketing mix.  Don’t just send everyone on your database an e-flyer – there will be some customers or clients who are particularly valuable to you or who are already repeat customers.  Treat these people with a little more care and attention – they deserve it!

In future articles I will be giving you hints & tips as well as examples of businesses here in the UK that are actively using greeting cards as a marketing tool.  Used in a well-thought-out way it should not be seen as a frivolous expense but rather as a marketing investment that will payback enormously in repeat and referral business.

Andrew Helm
October, 2009
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