Customer Birthdays Equal Added Profits In Your Business

Recently I wrote about collecting critical data (intel) within your business.  YES there is GOLD in them thar hills!

It is so IMPORTANT to identify who your customer is first of all.  If you have a retail storefront, you invested probably lots of your savings or investors did with theirs.  And you should make that investment work for you, not you working for it.

And there are many ways with technology today to accomplish your objectives.

Assuming you have started on the path to collecting data/intel from your current customers, one piece of critical data is your customers birthdays.  And if at all possible, find out who your customer’s spouse or significant other is as well.

Birthday promotions work for almost every business, but for example purposes I will talk about how a restaurant could (and should) implement such a promotion.

It is very common for a restaurant to offer a FREE dessert or even a FREE meal on your birthday (although it is getting harder to find restaurants offering free meals which tells me they do not understand the long term profitable effect of doing this kind of promotion).

Setting up a birthday reminder service is quite easy.  Once you obtain your customer birthday, simply enter it and set your reminder.

Now for the purposes of this specific promotion, you’ll want to set that reminder for at least three weeks before your customer birthday.

The reason is you are not just going to send a card with an offer in it.  Quite opposite.  You are going to do something that will result in you getting 10 to 30 or more NEW customers that you did not have before.

What you are going to do is call the customer spouse or significant other and explain to them that you would like to throw a surprise party for your customer.  99% of the time the spouse or significant other will be thrilled about the idea.

So what does the spouse or significant other need to give you in order to send invites to friends, business associates and family?  Give you the list of course!  This includes the name and full postal address.  This list of people are going to become your new prospective customers and you’ll see why in a moment here.

If you want to make this easy, I use a nifty company that sends the physical invite cards for me.  I simply upload my list, and they print the cards, stuff them in the envelope, lick it, stamp it (with a real stamp) and drop it in the mail for me all for far less than most greeting cards you buy in the store.  You can learn about it here http://seeit.me/soc .

So next you will take that list and send out the invites along with RSVP back to you (or the spouse/significant other).

You will actually have the party at your restaurant, and it is suggested to offer the people invited free drinks and 50% off a meal etc.

Once you determine how many are coming, this will help determine if you will get a special birthday cake or use individual dessert cakes that your restaurant may already serve.

Be sure and have a digital camera on hand the day of the party.  You’ll want to take several pictures.  This is one of the key ingredients in capturing big profits and customers on the long road.

Remember that easy service I use to send greeting cards?  http://seeit.me/soc Now what you will do as a final step is send cards out to all of the attendees a couple of days AFTER.  My service allows me to upload pictures which will print right onto the greeting card I choose (over 20,000 in the library online).

So it will only take me 10 to 15 minutes to create my card including the pictures I will upload.  Each card can even be personalized with the persons first name.

And if you are in the restaurant business, it makes sense to put another offer in this card, right?  Of course it does!

And everyone will love getting this card because the pictures will show what a good time everyone had.  And your customer who you threw the party for will never forget this.  I guarantee that.

You might find yourself spending $100 to $200 dollars on a promotion like this, but I would ask you to crunch the numbers and tell me if it was worth it.  Most advertising these days that you would spend upwards of $200 dollars MIGHT get you five to 10 new customers.

Yet with the birthday promotion, you can double and triple your numbers.  Not to mention the customer loyalty and satisfaction you will receive from it.

Now if you want to drive it even more, it would be real easy to get this kind of customer to fill out customer reviews online.  We live in a social media world.  You can’t hide bad customer service any longer.

And speaking of social media, if your restaurant had a Facebook page, you could post those birthday party pictures there too for your other customers to see.  Your new prospective customers will see how you treat them.  Take it a step further and post the pictures in your restaurant.

This type of promotion creates raving advocates for your business.  Customers that won’t hesitate to refer their friends, family and business associates.  We’ll talk about that in the next post where I reveal how to create and maintain a VIP Club and creating incentives for your customers to refer others.

In fact, once you get skilled with these kinds of promotions, I will go as far as to say you will never have to advertise in the traditional way ever again, while growing your business by double and triple or more.  Wash, Rinse and repeat!