The Boss of You

A few weeks ago I was in a plan­ning and strat­egy meet­ing for a non-profit client that is under­go­ing a bit of a re-branding process. As a part of the meet­ing the var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ca­tions folks at the table were dis­cussing with the client what types of mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als they’d like to apply the new iden­tity to, things like: “how will we apply it to the web­site?”, “how many new busi­ness cards do you need?” and “did you want us to take care of order­ing the let­ter­head?” were the ques­tions on the table. As the client listed out the var­i­ous appli­ca­tions for the new logo they’d need taken care of, the Exec­u­tive Direc­tor piped up and said “Oh! Can we get some thank you cards again? Those were so use­ful.” She went on to talk about how often they used the cards to thank donors, vol­un­teers, speak­ers who came in for fundrais­ing events, etc. In fact, by the time she was done talk­ing about the thank you cards, she decided to cut her order for busi­ness cards in half in order to assign more bud­get to thank you cards.

Sweet Beet Let­ter­press Card

As you’d know if you’ve read the book, we’re big fans of think­ing out­side the basic sta­tionery pack­age when it comes to think­ing about your mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als. Things like thank you cards (or a sim­ple post­card you can write a mes­sage on the back of) that use your logo or that iden­tify your busi­ness in some way can actu­ally be a great way to stay top of mind and cre­ate a con­nec­tion with your cus­tomers and clients — par­tic­u­larly if being “high touch” and per­sonal is a part of your business’s per­son­al­ity. We have one client who often sends along her cheques with a lovely lit­tle card (she intro­duced me to Sweet Beet whose let­ter­press card is shown here), and while she doesn’t send out “branded” cards, her atten­tion to detail and thought­ful­ness make her some­one that I’m always happy to boast about or rec­om­mend to another col­league with­out hesitation.

I was reminded of this con­ver­sa­tion this after­noon when I checked my mail­box to find a thank you card/postcard from the spa where I had some wax­ing ser­vices a few weeks ago. My expe­ri­ence at the spa was mem­o­rable on all fronts (for all the right rea­sons) and this post­card was an excel­lent exten­sion of the ser­vice I received. The spa is located at the back of a fab­u­lous jew­elry and cloth­ing store tucked into lower Yates Street in Vic­to­ria. I had made an appoint­ment there to coin­cide with a trip we were tak­ing to Vic­to­ria to visit my fam­ily, recall­ing that my mom had men­tioned how lovely the woman, Chris­tine, who ran the spa was. Chris­tine was in fact adorably lovely, remem­bered my mom and put together that I was her daugh­ter, gave me excel­lent ser­vice and sent me off on my way effi­ciently with­out mak­ing me feel rushed. Her post­card was per­son­al­ized and noted that next time I was in town she’d love to see me again. I hap­pen to know this woman’s busi­ness is doing very well, and that she’s in no des­per­ate need of clients, and if she con­tin­ues to offer this level of ser­vice and lit­tle per­son­al­ized touches like that I can’t imag­ine she ever will be. While I wouldn’t ever urge her to forgo busi­ness cards, I can tell you that the lovely post­card (which is now up on my fridge) will prob­a­bly get her more refer­rals than a busi­ness card I lost in the bot­tom of my purse ever would have.