Yes, Virginia, You Can Give a Holiday Gift to Your Customers

Have you shaken off the adrenaline hangover from another exciting Small Business Week? Good, because you know what you have to do next. You have to send the Holiday Present Note to sales. It will go something like this: “Hey, Sales, Marketing here. Just wondering if you’d like us to order some gifts for your clients this year.” So begins the Dance of the Sugar-Plum- Cellophane-Wrapped-Medium-Gift-Basket.

Sales will respond thus: “Go away, Marketing Monkey, we’re doing our bit to hold the line on expenses. We will not be giving gifts to our customers this year.”

But we know that’s just Act One. Keep those catalogues handy, because about a month from now, the first of the Sales Squirrels will hit quota, bury his nuts and start looking around for a customer to take to lunch. You can expect a call the next day that sounds a little like this: “Yo, marketing person! King of the Squirrels here. Say, I’m taking my customer to lunch tomorrow and was planning to give him a little gift to thank him for paying your salary over the past year.”

Naturally, you’ll smugly forward the previous message about expenses and holding the line and all that, but you’ll also be reaching for the catalogue because you know what’s next: The Pas de Deux of Exceptionalities. This usually takes the form of a huffy note pointing out that while gifts are an extravagance, some customers really ought to be recognized with a little something. And that something had better be festive and it had better have a logo on it and it had better be here next Tuesday.

The I-Told-You-So Dance you’ll do through the sales bullpen can be performed as either a solo or a line-dance involving clogs. Either way, you don’t really win because you’re stuck trying to order things that sold out weeks ago, while at the same time writing a letter to other clients explaining that in lieu of holiday cards, you’re donating to charity this year. Now that’s classy too.

So much needless debate goes on around holiday greetings and gifts and parties. Thank goodness I’m here to set things straight for you. Here it is: Give gifts and greeting cards to your customers this year and every year. Do you know why? Because you have a reason to reach out to them. A real reason, not a pretend one like you use to inundate them with junk mail, up-sells, cross-sells and telemarketers.

The end of the calendar year is a natural time to pause and reflect. Things slow down a little for most of us. Why wouldn’t you use that brief interlude to do the one thing you probably haven’t managed all year: saying thank you to your customers for spending money with you?

At the very least, every, single one of your customers should receive a holiday card in the mail. It should be a nice one, it should be signed by at least one human being in your company and it should arrive between December 1^st and 15^th. If you can order it from a charity such as UNICEF then that’s good too.

Decent E-cards are fine if you are a) a teenaged entrepreneur b) an entirely online venture with no customer-facing people c) just reading this and it’s December 15th. Otherwise, let’s do this up old style with a paper card.

If possible, your customers should each receive a phone call from their sales rep wishing them a happy holiday and thanking them for their business. Some customers, probably not all of them, but some of them, should receive a gift. We’ll talk about what those gifts should look like next week.

Please, please, please don’t advertise your abject laziness and lack of creativity by sending a form letter suggesting you have done the noble act of giving to charity instead of sending cards. Or that your staff  have forgone their Christmas party in favour of packing boxes at the food bank. That’s bullsh*t and your customers know it.

Including postage, a greeting card probably costs about a buck. So let’s assume you have 5,000 customers. Gee, that’s less than you spent on golf balls this year, and we all know it and so do your customers. So go ahead and send your cards AND write a big, fat cheque to a charity that needs it. And do us all a favour and don’t tell us. We assume that successful companies pay it back.

Staff going to the food bank or collecting warm coats or serving in a soup kitchen? Great. That’s part of being a  member of a  community. Why are you telling your customers? If they’re part of the same community, chances are you’ll see them out there helping too.  Let’s make a promise to stop using our acts of kindness as marketing messages. It demeans everything. And that goes for pink ribbons on yogurt. I’m coming after you too.

Bizmarketer is Elizabeth Williams
Follow me on Twitter @bizmkter
or email escwilliams@gmail.com