Clients appreciation improves your client relationships and facilitates retention—and it doesn’t cost much to execute.
When customers feel appreciated, they’re much more likely to stick around, and they’re more likely to recommend you to a friend or colleague. If you apply a customer appreciation strategy consistently, you can greatly improve both client retention and acquisition, and sustain business growth indefinitely.
These tips and strategies will help you design and execute a consistent client appreciation strategy:
Be specific in your messaging
Whenever you’re writing messages of appreciation or doing something special for a customer, be specific. A generic “thank you” card won’t mean nearly as much as a paragraph-long message of gratitude for the experience of working together.
Send handwritten notes or greeting cards
Email and other digital messages can be valuable, but few communications are as powerful as receiving physical mail. Consider printing greeting cards for your clients, and/or sending handwritten notes. The excitement of getting a piece of physical mail that isn’t junk can instantly make someone feel appreciated—and handwriting always feels more personal than written text.
Apply both group and individual appreciation
Your customer appreciation strategy should include both individual and group level tactics. At the individual level, you can send gifts, write notes, and take clients out to dinner. At the group level, you can host customer appreciation weeks and special events where your customers can gather together.
Remember the Pareto principle
The Pareto principle is an informal rule that says you get about 80% of your results from about 20% of your efforts. For our purposes, we can estimate that 80% of your revenue will come from 20% of your customers. Even if your business doesn’t closely follow that formula, we can assume that some of your customers will be inherently more valuable than others. Accordingly, your most valuable customers should be the ones getting the most appreciation. Appreciate all your customers, even the small ones, but go above and beyond for the ones you’re most eager to keep.
Take advantage of the holidays.
Holidays are the perfect opportunity to show appreciation for all your clients. Around commonly celebrated holidays, like Christmas or Eid, consider sending a gift basket (or at least a card in the mail). The same is true for birthdays and celebrating personal accomplishments.
Offer discounts and freebies
For recurring customers, consider offering periodic discounts and freebies. Customers love to see surprise discounts applied to their orders, and they love getting free extras in the mail even more.
