Budgeting for customer appreciation
Once you’ve taken stock of what you’d like to offer customers, it’s time to put it in your budget and make sure you can afford it. For each type of appreciation tactic you’d like to explore, decide how much it would cost for one customer (ie. the cost of 1 sticker or free shipping) and then decide how many customers you’d like to appreciate with that specific tactic.
Knowing your profit margins is really important when it comes to offering discounts. A 30% discount code might be more than you can afford on some of your products or services. If you share a discount code to all of your followers on Facebook, plan for many of them to take you up on it and don’t discount products below cost.
Make sure to plan for a variety of ideas, from the very frugal (like just saying thank you in an email!) to discounts to more high-value activities like customer dinners or sponsorships. There are ideas to fit every budget because appreciating customers don’t always have to be expensive.
Delivering on customer appreciation
You’ve made a plan and know that you can afford it. Now you actually have to make it happen.
Getting your team on board usually won’t be too difficult, because doing nice things for customers feels nice. But even if everyone agrees in theory, it can be hard to remember and make time for delivering on customer appreciation tactics. This is why building in time and processes for thanking customers is the key to making it happen.
Decide who on the team is responsible for each tactic. If you need to write handwritten cards, is that something that everyone on the team does themselves, or do you have an “appreciation” person who manages the process? Can you build free samples into your shipping process? Any way that you can incorporate gratitude into your team’s workflows can help.
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Putting aside time on everyone’s calendars once each week for writing handwritten cards and sending them out.
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Assign space on your social media calendar for customer appreciation content like sharing your customers’ businesses.
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Schedule a customer dinner every time your team travels to an event or customer onsite visit.
Another option is to make customer appreciation part of your team’s key performance metrics. Include gratitude on ticket quality assurance rubrics or set a quota for every team member to send out five handwritten cards each quarter. What gets measured gets done, so set a target for your team and make it happen.
The more normalized customer appreciation becomes, the more frequently you’ll see it happen. It’s all about creating a culture where anyone in the company feels empowered to surprise and delight customers using the processes you’ve set up for customer appreciation.