Show Customer Appreciation With Birthday Gifts
By lazy submit
This past spring I was reading an article about customer retention and how to figure out the LTV (life-time-value) of loyal customers. Being in the ultra-competitive financial planning industry, I was hoping to find ways to satisfy my customers beyond just making smart decisions with their assets. The article made a strong point that it is important to make your customers feel that you are thinking about them even when you aren't necessarily working on their portfolio. I started thinking to myself, "What can I do to make my clients feel valued?"

I came to the conclusion that letting my clients know how much I value their business would not be as hard as I thought if I just made a point to get them small gifts and cards on their birthdays and on holidays. Establishing relationships with clients is vital to building future business-after all, it costs 10 times as much to acquire new clients than to keep old clients-but maintaining those relationships is the key to building a network of referrals. The question I then asked myself was how much time will I spend personalizing and mailing out these gifts to my client base that is now approaching 200? Isn't there a more efficient and cost effective way to get this done and still achieve the same results?

So I did some searching online and found the answer is yes. I came across a business called The Company based in Coralville, Iowa that specializes in corporate gift delivery services. I went to their website http://www.birthdayco.com and after signing up for an account (which is free) I was able to solve my problem.

Once I created my account on the website, they sent me a free sample and in four days I received a beautifully personalized card as well as a tasty gift. At this point I was sold so I simply emailed a spreadsheet containing the names, addresses, and birthdays of my clients, which they entered into my password protected account for me (also free). Then I selected an account budget between $2.95 and $29.95 per client mailing. I am now able to sign into my account to view and make changes to my client list, like addresses, gift/price categories, add/delete clients. I can even personalize greetings for my entire list or for specific clients.

The Company now sends all of my customers a personalized card and gift on their birthdays. The gifts are randomly selected from gourmet chocolates, specialty candies, fancy brittles, toffees

By: kuttu
i want a feed to connect forum and blog
By: Unofficial DreamHost Blog » Blog Archive » Discussion Forum RSS Feed downtime
[...] I just realized that the The Unofficial DreamHost Discussion Forum RSS Feed (what a name!) haven’t been updated since I upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.0.4 three days ago (forgot to change my .htaccess). [...]
By: Ian Sealy
Sorry about the delay in replying. A very busy couple of weeks. I doubt that having a large feed is a problem, but I think that having two separate feeds would be best. That way people can just choose which one they prefer. Thanks for looking at this.
By: Unofficial DreamHost Blog
Ian - Just realised that I misread your comment. Somehow I thought that you wanted a feed for each forum (category/board). Sorry! Ian, Josh - I've now experimented with a feed that includes all the posts' content. It works pretty well, and it's really nice to be able to read the entire post in a feedreader. The only problem is that the rss-file is around 150 kb. Is this too much? Would it be better to limit the feed to only last 24 hours (currently it contains last 48 hours), or to only include excerpts. Another option would be to keep the existing rss feed with headlines only and then have another full post feed as an alternative. I would really like to hear your opinion on this... Thanks.
By: Unofficial DreamHost Blog
Josh - I agree that it would be more useful, but it would also require that I requested and parsed every single post in the feed every time I regenerate the RSS file (every 5 minutes) or saved a copy of every post in a database. I might give it a try, but I won't promise anything...
By: Josh Santangelo
Seems to work fine, but it would be far more useful if the actual post content were included.
By: Unofficial DreamHost Blog
Ian - I guess that would be possible. Let's wait a couple of days to see if there's any problems with the main feed. <del>If more people would like category specific feeds please say ai!</del>
By: Ian Sealy
Would it be possible to put each forum post's content in the feed?

and Starbucks Cards and are automatically rotated so the customer will never receive the same gift twice. They also rotate dozens of greeting card designs so that even my clients in the same household (husband & wife) will get different cards. The best part is the envelopes are personalized with my return address so it appears I took the time to send them myself!

I think I am starting to figure out this customer retention idea. Over the past six months, I've noticed the referrals from current clients has nearly doubled, allowing me to finally scale back on the time consuming and expensive investor seminars, print advertising and radio spots I had been doing for several years. Please don't get me wrong, I think these strategies are extremely important for someone trying to break into this crazy business, but after five years and a solid client base, I'm finding it's much easier to convince someone they need my services when they're a referral than it is to convince a stranger.

My next step is to try out the holiday, anniversary, and thank you mailings The Company offers to their customers. If it works as well as the mailings have, maybe I'll be able to rely on just referrals to build my business from here on. Wish me luck.

Thank you Birthday Company

Article Source: http://www.articlemap.com

Based out of Coralville, Iowa, The Company was created out of a demand from the financial planning, insurance, medical, and real estate sectors for a better corporate-client gift giving service. Remembering client birthdays is The Company's business, so that professionals can concentrate on their own business. Birthday Company

By: kuttu
i want a feed to connect forum and blog
By: Unofficial DreamHost Blog » Blog Archive » Discussion Forum RSS Feed downtime
[...] I just realized that the The Unofficial DreamHost Discussion Forum RSS Feed (what a name!) haven’t been updated since I upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.0.4 three days ago (forgot to change my .htaccess). [...]
By: Ian Sealy
Sorry about the delay in replying. A very busy couple of weeks. I doubt that having a large feed is a problem, but I think that having two separate feeds would be best. That way people can just choose which one they prefer. Thanks for looking at this.
By: Unofficial DreamHost Blog
Ian - Just realised that I misread your comment. Somehow I thought that you wanted a feed for each forum (category/board). Sorry! Ian, Josh - I've now experimented with a feed that includes all the posts' content. It works pretty well, and it's really nice to be able to read the entire post in a feedreader. The only problem is that the rss-file is around 150 kb. Is this too much? Would it be better to limit the feed to only last 24 hours (currently it contains last 48 hours), or to only include excerpts. Another option would be to keep the existing rss feed with headlines only and then have another full post feed as an alternative. I would really like to hear your opinion on this... Thanks.
By: Unofficial DreamHost Blog
Josh - I agree that it would be more useful, but it would also require that I requested and parsed every single post in the feed every time I regenerate the RSS file (every 5 minutes) or saved a copy of every post in a database. I might give it a try, but I won't promise anything...
By: Josh Santangelo
Seems to work fine, but it would be far more useful if the actual post content were included.
By: Unofficial DreamHost Blog
Ian - I guess that would be possible. Let's wait a couple of days to see if there's any problems with the main feed. <del>If more people would like category specific feeds please say ai!</del>
By: Ian Sealy
Would it be possible to put each forum post's content in the feed?