Appreciation Marketing; A Strategy Based on Gratitude

 

Lori Saitz is the founder of Zen Rabbit, a company dedicated to helping its customers show their gratitude to their own clientele, through the medium of tasty cookies and other gifts. She explains why appreciation marketing has proven to be so successful as a simple matter of making your customers feel good: “You’re making people feel good, feel valued. That’s not so common these days, and that makes them like you.”

 

 

You’ve gone to the effort of winning over a customer and doing work that you expect will please them. Appreciation marketing just makes a point of letting your client know that you’re willing to go the extra mile for them. There’s a certain expectation for the effort—Saitz points to the logic of the law of reciprocity, that if you do something nice for a person, they’ll feel compelled to repay you for that effort. But for many business owners, doing something nice for a customer just feels like the right thing to do.

 

It’s important to consider whether you’re in a business that will particularly benefit from appreciation marketing strategies; most companies can get some good will from thanking their customers, but certain businesses will have bigger wins than others. Saitz explains, “The businesses for which appreciation marketing is most valuable are the ones with the highest lifetime value of a client. . . If a client is worth thousands of dollars to your business, it makes sense to invest a few bucks in letting them know you value the relationship. It’s important to figure out what that lifetime value is before you can decide what you want to invest in keeping them.”

 

You may also want to look at what your clients get from working with you. If you’re putting a physical product in their hands, it’s easier for a customer to remember the benefit of your work. But if you’re offering a service, you may need to give your customers something tangible as a reminder. “Professional services businesses, such as financial advisors, CPAs, and consulting firms mostly deliver non-tangible value. The same thing is true for online businesses, such as SEO, online marketing and software companies or business and leadership coaches,” points out Saitz. “You’re not making and handing over a pair of shoes that someone can see, so it’s important give some kind of tangible acknowledgement of gratitude, even if it’s just a handwritten thank you note.”

 

 

Depending on the products or services you offer, you may find yourself reinforcing certain messages over and over again. A token of your appreciation, paired with an idea that you want to drive home, can help the point stick. Saitz has seen her cookies have exactly that impact: “Jim has a newsletter membership service. Even though he tells new clients up front that it may take up to a year for them to see results, some clients were getting impatient and dropping out after seven or eight months. We started sending them a box of Gratitude Cookies at six months, with a note thanking them for being a valued client and subscriber and how Jim is looking forward to a long and mutually profitable relationship (planting a seed in their minds that this is a long-term deal). Very quickly, Jim’s client retention doubled and his average client now stays with him 18 months.”

 

You don’t even have to wait until you’ve landed a client to use these strategies. You can set a prospect’s expectation that you’ll treat her better than your competition from your first interaction. Another of Saitz’s customers sends out cookies as a standard part of his proposal process: “Everte actually used appreciation marketing to get new business. Shortly after dropping off a lengthy proposal for his services, he would send a box of Gratitude Cookies with a note saying something such as ‘I know you have a lot of information to read through. Take your time, get a cup of coffee or a glass of milk. Here’s a box of cookies to enjoy while you’re reading. I look forward to working with you.’ (Again, planting a seed in their mind that he expects to work with them.) These $32 expenditures on boxes of Gratitude Cookies were getting him $25,000 jobs!”

 

 

Making a point of showing your customers that you are grateful for their business can be simple. Even just sending the occasional thank you note can offer you the reward of a better client relationship. For a busy business owner, writing a few thank you notes each week can feel like a mountain of work. However, you can make appreciation marketing a priority, by changing the way you think about it. Saitz offers some suggestions for anyone struggling with finding the time to implement appreciation marketing strategies: “They need to truly understand how much money they are leaving on the table by not paying more attention to it. If it costs 5 or 7 or 9 (choose your favorite stat) times more money, time and effort to get new clients, than it does to keep the ones you already have, you would be wise to invest in client retention and loyalty!”

 

From there, it’s a question of building a plan for your company, with set tasks that you can create systems around. If you can make expressing your appreciation a daily habit, you’ll see an outsized impact. “Since the reality is that people get distracted from these efforts by day to day responding to emails and phone calls, business people need to incorporate an appreciation marketing system into their (hopefully) existing marketing plan,” explains Saitz. “Whenever a system exists, things get done. So, if you take an hour or two, sit down and think through what happens when I get a referral, a new client, it’s a client’s birthday, etc. you can come up with an answer to what you do whenever one of those situations arise. Oh, someone gave you a referral, that person gets a box of Gratitude Cookies, or a bamboo arrangement or a copy of your favorite business book—whatever it is, it becomes your standard referral thank you.”

 

With the right system in place, you can look for opportunities to automate the process—though this is one marketing strategy where a personal touch counts for a lot. Make sure that you keep your finger on the pulse of your appreciation marketing strategies.