"I love my customers," Joe Girard would say. Apparently they loved him too. Over a period of fifteen years, he averaged personal sales of over 900 cars each and every year! Imagine his value to his employer, Merollis Chevrolet! Joe was the number one salesman in the country every year from 1967 to 1977. The magnitude of that feat almost defies description. How did he do it? He was a "Go-Giver" - He truly loved his customers. [Joe Girard's own web site.]
It's said that on Saturday mornings, a line of people would form at the entrance of the dealership long before the scheduled opening. Everyone was waiting for Joe Girard to come to work and they wanted to talk to him about buying a car. Every one of them rebuffed offers of help from co-workers. They only wanted to talk to Joe, no one else would do.
He developed a follow up system where he would stay in touch with all his customers and prospects by sending them cards in the mail. They weren't even cards designed to sell, just simple "thank yous" and customer appreciation cards. He made it a point to capture and record the contact information of every person he met or talked to. Then over the months ahead, and for each and every month thereafter, he sent each one of them a card.
"I would send a card every month with a different picture, a different greeting, and the card would say, 'I like you,' " Joe recalls. An incredibly simple thing to do to establish a customer relationship. People value personal communication.
In the last few years of Joe's automobile sales career, he would, with the help of two assistants, send out over 13,000 handwritten cards a month. But from these, he received a flood of business.
Now I don't know about you, but when I hear this, the first thing I think is, "Okay that's great... but I don't have time to be writing notes, peeling stamps and mailing out cards one-by-one to all my prospects. And 13,000 of them? Are you kidding?!"
Postcard marketing was something I always wanted to add to my consulting and training business because I'd heard from a lot of other business owners that it dramatically increases conversion rates... but there was just no way I could see myself finding the time to do it.
However, I found a marketing tool that allows one to do this without ever touching a single card or even going to the Post Office. It's 100% automated, just like an email autoresponder.
You load your prospect's contact info, select a pre-made postcard or customize your own, click a button and it's on its way. You can do this for hundreds, even thousands of prospects and you can also set up timed sequences where they receive a card one week, another 4 weeks later, etc., etc. Greeting cards with your own optional photos, personalized handwriting font, and scanned assortment of signatures.
It can do all that, but the best application is its ease of use for sending personalized "Thank you notes" and "I remember notes."
