Customer Appreciation

What is customer appreciation?

Customer or client appreciation is the act of expressing gratitude and thankfulness to your customers for continuing to choose your business. Showing customers that you value their business is a simple and effective way to delight your customers in the short term and develop deep brand loyalty in the long-term.

Customer appreciation scripts

1. Thank you for supporting our small business. We're so lucky to have you here.

2. Thank you for choosing . We can't wait to serve you again.

3. You are a beloved member of the , and we thank you for your constant support.

4. Thank you so much for shopping with us. Use code: “THANK YOU” to get 10% off on your next purchase.

5. Thank you for being a part of the . We're delighted to have you here.

6. We appreciate your contribution immensely. Thank you for trusting .

7. Thank you for being a loyal customer of .

8. Thank you for shopping from . We can't wait to have you back.

9. Thank you for contacting support. We're happy to help you.

10. Thank you for reaching out to us. How can we help you today?

3 customer appreciation examples

Here are examples of three popular brands implementing some of the customer appreciation ideas we’ve discussed.

Zappos' customer appreciation event

Zappos, a crowd-favorite e-commerce company, is known for going out of the way to delight customers. So, it's no surprise they go the extra mile when it comes to customer appreciation too. 

In addition to sending personalized gifts with orders, to thank customers, the company planned customer appreciation events during weekends throughout the year of 2017. They called it the Friends with Benefits Roadshow and it had fun activities that included local food, live music, and puppy fashion shows to show appreciation to customers and give back to the community.

Zappos proves that in-person meet and greets coupled with fun activities can be the perfect icebreaker for thanking customers, and for strengthening customer relationships. 

Sephora's customer loyalty programs

The popular skincare and beauty products retailer, Sephora, shows gratitude by rewarding customers for purchasing their products. Sephora has a three-tiered loyalty program that is raved about for its exclusive rewards, sales, gifts, and more. The Beauty Insider program is the most-talked-about customer loyalty initiative, with rewards that include free samples, birthday gifts, and makeup. 

This is a fine example of how customer appreciation initiatives can help you gain a loyal customer base and contribute to business growth too.   

Nike's milestone celebration

Nike had a day-long celebration on Instagram to celebrate the second anniversary of its presence on social media. Nike selected ten inspiring photos uploaded by its fans and reshared the images with a motivational caption. Nike earned a lot of love and recognition for appreciating its customers who appreciate the brand.

The biggest takeaway here is that low-effort, low-cost customer appreciation activities like resharing can be effective, as long as it's genuine.

Questions to address before putting together an appreciation strategy

The first step to putting together a customer appreciation strategy is to decide how you want to thank your customers. There are several questions to ask to determine which ideas will work best for your business.

• What type of customers do you serve? Are they businesses, or consumers?

• What do your customers care most about? What are they motivated by?

• What bonuses can you offer as a thank you? Shipping, upsells, samples, etc?

Understanding what your customers will value is the first part of determining how you can thank them. Then, look into what you have available to offer as a thank you. Matching what your customers' value with what you can provide is the key to an effective appreciation strategy.

Budgeting for customer appreciation

Once you’ve taken stock of what you’d like to offer your 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.

• Putting aside time on everyone’s calendars once each week for writing handwritten cards and sending them out.

• Assign space on your social media calendar for customer appreciation content like sharing your customers’ businesses.

• 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.

Measuring the success of customer appreciation

Customer appreciation is key to developing customer loyalty and increasing customer retention. In order to measure the impact your customer appreciation strategy has on your business’s financial metrics, you’ll need to look at the associated changes in retention and sales.

For example, does offering a discount code to a loyal customer increase their order size or the frequency of their purchases? That increase is the direct result of any investment in customer appreciation. If you’re genuinely thanking customers in support inquiries, do you see customer experience and customer retention improve?

You could also measure how much positive buzz or social media activity your customer appreciation strategy generates by tracking online mentions. Customer appreciation is great PR.

To measure how customer appreciation improves loyalty, choose a few metrics that you want to impact by appreciating customers and track them both before and after your strategy goes live.