Latitude 53

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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