Putting Client Appreciation at the Top of Your Marketing Strategy!
We all love being appreciated – whether it’s by our family, our friends or by those we work for and with. Showing appreciation is a simple act that makes anyone feel special and a client who feels special is a loyal client – and we know how important that is!
Just as you have a business plan to keep your business headed in the proper direction, you should also have a client appreciation plan in place in order to reward the loyal clients who do business with you.
One of the simplest ideas is to send Appreciation /Thank You cards. This is THE most effective way to build relationships that last with clients and business contacts. You can either purchase generic cards or have them created to reflect you and your business. Above is a sample of the Thank You card we use here at Fuzednotions.
Some occasions to celebrate:
- Celebrate anniversary date your client first came to you with business
- Reward a referral
- A client is using your services more than usual – Yeah!
- Any other reason that you can think of to Celebrate!
You have your reason(s) – now how do you organize this to ensure that it’s executed?
The calendar is a beautiful thing – especially the electronic versions – Google & Outlook have calendars or use any a version that you are already familiar with – that goes for the old fashion paper/hard copy kind too.
Sit down and break up the year by each quarter, month, or week – whichever way works for your business – “pencil in/schedule” an appreciation day and a list client(s) you want to celebrate for that allotted time. Ex – In April send a Thank You to your Accountant/Bookkeeper – tax season!
Set up a reminder to notify you the week or day before. Have a supply of Appreciation/Thank You cards readily available, and when the reminder pops up, take 5 minutes to jot down a quick “thank you note”. Put it in the envelope, add a stamp and mail. Easy-Peasy – You’re done!
How You Can Send Files to Designers and Printers!
So, you’ve sent your designer or printer the files for a project and they’ve told you that the files are too small to work with or that they’re the wrong file type. So how can you tell if a file is big enough? We know that file types and sizes can be confusing. So, here’s a little bit of a guide:
Raster vs. Vector
At this point you should be staring blankly at your computer screen, and for those that aren’t – 10 points. I’m going to do my best to explain this sans-technobabble.
Raster graphics (jpg, gif, png, bmp) are what everyone is used to. Whenever you take a picture with a digital camera or look at a website, you are looking at raster images. Rasters are made up of tiny dots called pixels. The more pixels that fit inside an inch, the better the image looks; this is called resolution. The problem here is that since a file only has a certain number of pixels, you can only scale the image down and never up (you can’t add pixels, you can only subtract them). So, when it comes to raster graphics – the bigger the file, the better.
Vector Graphics (ai, eps, pdf (sometimes)) are much rarer than raster graphics, but if you want to see a designer grin like a lunatic, give them a vector file. In short, a vector is an image that made up of mathematically positioned points that create an image. As a result, they can be scaled to fit on the side of a building or on a business card without any difference in file-size, and they have roughly the same effect to designers as cat-nip has to cats (there is a lot of purring and drooling involved). If you want to find out if something is a vector, zoom into the image as far as you can; if you see squares – not a vector.
Basic Guide:
- Send logos in a vector format (ai, eps, pdf).
- Provide the biggest photos you have.
- Try to avoid grabbing logos or photos off of websites (they’ve usually been shrank, compressed, and optimized to reduce file size).
- Always send files in their native format. i.e. never in word processor documents or presentation files (they degrade them horribly to help reduce the file size of the document).
- Never stretch an image to make it bigger (remember, you can only scale the image down – never up).
What’s New at Fuzednotions
We – and I don’t mind tooting my own horn – are celebrating the fact that I am now full time. Yeah!!
I want you all to take a cerebral moment and picture colorful confetti and streamers falling! Keep that picture in the back of your mind. Now, if you don’t already know, Jessica has a talent to of taking the cerebral and putting it into the actual.
On the day that I officially became full time, I came to work to find that my desk, chair, and general work area completely covered with colorful sticky notes. And to add to the festivities, everything was backwards – from my printer, to my chair, to the images on my computer screen. I never realized how much square footage you can cover with sticky notes. I must say that the sticky notes are handy.
It is a tradition at Fuzednotions that when a person becomes fulltime, they are “showered” with appreciation. When Justin became fulltime back in the day, his work area was covered in pink.
Now that I’m full time, Jessica can freely roam from the office and trust that everything goes smoothly.
Give us a call at 705-949-3198.
