If you never knew you were doing something wrong, would you change? If you thought for your entire life that the way you conducted yourself and your small business was the proper way, would you consider that you might be wrong? Odds are you wouldn’t, but feel free to let me know in the comments section how you would handle yourself in that situation, I’d love to talk with you and see how we all would handle that situation.
Customer feedback is essential to your business; but why? If you’re customer feels great about your business and gives you a testimonial to showcase on your website, in your brochures and other print material, doesn’t that show you that you’re doing something right? Well, that is the perfect scenario but the majority of the time your customers won’t give honest feedback unless they’re asked for it; so ask.
Why asking the general public won’t work
There are many people out there that will tell you that you need to stick a ‘feedback form’ on your website and leave it at that. Or maybe they suggest that you send out a mass email to every client you’ve had or every email on your list. Doing the latter would result in 100+ emails being sent out all titled “Dear Valued Customer”. This is the absolute WORST way to attract attention to yourself and will undoubtedly result in 100+ emails being deleted. Generalizations just won’t work.
People want to feel like they’re part of a relationship with your business, like their opinion is truly valued and appreciated. In doing this, you’re catering to their ego’s and ensuring that they’ll give you a 100% honest review of your product or service. Without the personal attachment, they could care less and will throw your letter away or delete your email or totally disregard the big “GIVE ME FEEDBACK” button your website is now showing.
A simple solution to personalization
The easiest way to instill the personalized touch to your customers is with a hand written letter. Yes, you heard me right, hand written letters. I know you’re thinking it sounds crazy, but if a bootstrapper knows one thing, its how to maximize your productivity in a short amount of time to ensure you get the most out of your time. What does this mean for you? Simple; you’re going to see exactly how to streamline this method while keeping the personalized touch you need in order to get the customers attention long enough to get their honest opinion.
If you remember a while back in my The art of the email: Long emails are better for business article, I talked about a firefox plug-in named “Signature“. Well, we’re going to try something similar, but with handwriting. How you ask? Get a sheet of your stationary and get a pen; once you’ve got this far, you’re half way there. Now, write out a letter like you would to any client or customer you’ve just done business with except you need to leave out the introduction line and salutation.
So, you’ve got the entire body of the letter wrote out explaining how you valued their business and loved working with them on their project right? You’ve signed the bottom and you have everything setup except the welcome note at the top. Great! Now take this piece of paper and photo copy it 100+ times (1 sheet for every client you’re going to mail). On each sheet, now you only need to write out their name and a brief introduction paragraph to ensure that you’re giving that personalized touch that reaches their heart 
The final step – lick the envelope
Well, not literally, but if you’re into that kind of thing, go for it. Personally, I use a sponge thats slightly damp to close my envelopes. The main thing to do during this process is to HAND WRITE the name and address of the person you’re contacting on the envelope. You might even want to write “Thank You” on it down towards the right or left of the envelope, just to give it that extra pop. Seeing a hand written letter gets a drastically higher open rate compared to a printed piece of envelope with a bright red “OPEN” sign on it so take advantage of this.
This post was inspired by an article I read at another website recently: How to seek feedback and I just wanted to expand on it. If you’re not a reader over at Trizle yet, I’d highly suggest checking the site out. Andrew is a great guy and someone who knows a LOT about business; and constantly is posting about it.
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