Appreciate Your Customers with Swag

Customer Appreciation Day is celebrated on the third Friday in May. However, many would say that customers deserve to be celebrated every day as they are imperative to the success of a business. While this statement seems as straightforward as they come, many business owners can quickly become caught up in the other aspects of running a business and unintentionally lose customers along the way. 

Adding Customer Appreciation Day to your company calendar this year in May can be an incredibly beneficial way to show your past, current, and future customers how much you care about their business. Expressing your gratitude is the entire point behind National Client Appreciation Day, and many consumers expect to feel valued by the companies with which they choose to do business. 

If you've noticed many once-loyal clients slipping away and losing repeat orders, it's time to make a change. A Customer Appreciation Day will thank your customers for their patronage, the unwavering trust they put in you, and the goods or services you provide. 

There are many benefits of a Customer Appreciation Day celebration, including:

• Increased market value via happy customers and their positive feedback, providing an advantage in the marketplace.
• Viewing customers as a loyal long-term partnership leads to higher retention rates and increased positive associations.
• Repeat customers tend to spend more with each visit leading to increased profits from loyal customers.
• Positive reviews, including word of mouth, online reviews, and product forums, encourage great first impressions.

Customer appreciation is beyond essential to business survival; you can implement it for more than one day each year. You can show your customers they matter in many ways, including high-quality customer service efforts and transparency regarding business matters. 

Get To Know Your Customers Day

Knowing your customer base is imperative and should come about in the early stages of a startup, though it can fluctuate and change throughout the life of a business. Knowing your customer base or holding a national “Get to Know Your Customers Day” can help ensure that your original targeted demographic stays within reach of your current marketing efforts. 

Getting to know your customer can happen through specific social media events, like Getting to Know Your Customers Day, or through marketing analytics based on social and ad interactions. Investing in social media customer interaction is always a good idea because many people are more than willing to voice their opinions on social platforms. 

If you want to plan a day to get to know your customers, you could create a customer questionnaire or host a giveaway. Planning your social content is incredibly beneficial in this situation because you can put out posts that ask for interaction in a way that encourages your base to respond. 

As with customer appreciation, you don't have to limit getting to know your customers to one day per year or month or whenever you've planned your event. Instead, you can regularly gain information on them through your ad and post interaction analytics and by leveraging your customer service interactions to learn their personal preferences and tastes. 

A lack of understanding regarding customer behavior doesn't have to stress you out. Perhaps a social media meme goes viral with a negative message that sounds or looks like your brand name or logo. You can figure out how that might affect your customer base by having a firm grasp on who they are and by interacting with them regularly.

Even if your business has a heavy online-only presence, you don't want your customers to be strangers. Please take the time to get to know them in any way possible! 

Customer Appreciation Events

Customer appreciation events can be of great help, especially for a frustrated marketing manager whose job could be on the line. Bringing back lost clients is a crucial piece of the marketing puzzle, but it's challenging to do so when you need to figure out why they've left. 

Before you hold an event, you'll want to brainstorm some Customer Appreciation Day ideas. You can do this with the help of your marketing team or alone. Anything is possible in the planning process if the goal is to bring back a customer. Let's discuss some customer appreciation week ideas!

Handwritten Thank You's

Handwritten thank-you notes are a great way to express appreciation, and it's a common practice from big brands like Chewy. Gratitude is one of the best Customer Appreciation Day themes because you can't thank them enough for choosing you. 

Sending A Gift

Choosing a meaningful gift is a fantastic way to show your customers how much you care. You can send your gift with a current purchase or via email as a discount, which works perfectly for virtual Customer Appreciation Day ideas. Your customer gift should mean something to your customer base, so take the time to get thoughtful, creative, and personal. 

Establish An Advocacy Program

Customer advocacy is all about the needs of your customer. By building trust through stellar customer service and preparing a message, product, or loyalty program worthy of sharing, you're effectively creating customer advocacy. 

Keep your customer advocacy program as simple as possible, and remember that happy customers make happy advocates. Finding the perfect balance between rewards and turning a profit can be tricky, but the brainstorming sessions and trial and error will all be worth it in the long run! Whatever route you choose to take, promote it just as you would any event. 

Customer Appreciation Day Gifts

Your client base will notice Customer Appreciation Day swag. You can't go wrong with Customer Appreciation Day gifts unless you're completely unaware of your target audience. Before settling on a Customer Appreciation Day gift, make sure you've researched and that it's an item your consumers will love. 

Customer Appreciation Day’s meaning is to celebrate your customers and show them how much they mean to you. Choosing personalized items with your brand label is an excellent option, and SwagMagic is your best bet. From computer bags to pop sockets, you can please your customers with a Customer Appreciation Day gifts box full of items they'll use! 

Remember that you only want to send your clients something that makes sense. For example, if you own a computer repair company, consider sending out a laptop bag with a purchase of a certain amount. A customer appreciation giveaway doesn't have to be free, so don't stress out if free items aren't in your budget. 

The best customer giveaways often come with a purchase. For example, you might give your customers a gift of a free water bottle or travel mug with a $15 purchase to celebrate their loyalty. They expect to spend money with you, but they will always appreciate you going the extra mile.

While customer gifts will bring in some new clients and encourage past ones to make another purchase, their primary purpose is to encourage re-engagement. You want your brand at the forefront of their minds regarding your specific products and services, and branded gifts can make a huge difference in their recall. 

Branded travel products, promotional home goods, and comfort items like sweatshirts can make wonderful customer appreciation gifts. They'll never forget where it came from.

Understanding Customer Appreciation

Before you embark on a customer appreciation journey, you must understand what events, outreach programs, or gifts will help your customers feel appreciated. It's common for marketing managers to misread reports, mistaking the loss of general customers and prospects for what is actually VIP and loyalty customers. Needless to say, this is a massive mistake.

If your customer appreciation plan isn't targeting the right part of your base, you could have a problem. For example, a branded gift with a handwritten note could confuse the receiver, depending on the vocabulary used. Regardless, you will likely still see an increase in sales (and maybe a nice raise), even if the message needs to be corrected.

So, what can you learn from a marketing manager that sets out to pull in new customers via appreciation days featuring events and gifts but targets the wrong clients? In this case, you can learn that even an off-message customer appreciation outreach attempt can work, inspiring you to do your research, acquire the necessary analytics, and target the clients you want to bring back the most. 

A well-thought-out customer outreach plan can bring your business back to life, fixing strained relationships and reminding your customers why you're the best at what you do. It will establish brand recall, so you're always at the forefront of their minds when they require your products and services. 

Above all, giveaways and events encourage engagement, allowing you to be transparent regarding your business and your customer base to continue to build trust in you and elevate your online presence. Customer appreciation events are fun, but generally, you can show your clients how much you care daily via excellent customer service methods and conversing with them as much as possible via social media. 

SwagMagic can help you plan your customer appreciation gifts today. Contact us for more details!