The Art of Planning Client Appreciation Events

One of the best ways to nurture your relationship with your database is to hold periodic customer appreciation events. It's a great way to have everyone come together and, at the same time, offer something different.

There are two advantages to this approach for customer appreciation events:

1. It gives you a chance to provide added value to your customers and mingle with them socially.
2. You can suggest that they "bring a friend," which will then allow you to add them to your database and expand your numbers for future follow-up.

Beyond just putting an event date in your calendar, your CRM makes it easy for you to plan and manage all the tasks that need to be done in order to pull off a successful customer appreciation event. Starting with creating and sending all event-related correspondence including invitation emails, direct mail, event reminders, and follow-up communications to your event – similar to how you would manage all of your listing and closing activity plans.

Here are some ideas that have been successful for many of my coaching clients.

• Sleigh ride or hay-wagon ride
• Farm visit at Thanksgiving – pumpkin carving
• Movie showing Saturday morning for children at a theater
• Evening boat cruise
• Christmas festival in the local park
• Skating party
• Family picnic
• Potluck supper event

• Evening cocktails/dinner and dance
• Magic show with clowns and crafts for children
• Cultural event – for example: Caribbean night/Chinese New Year
• Winter Blues Festival – cocktails and music
• Greek food festival
• Home show tickets
• Baby of the Year Contest
• Cottage Life Show
• Winemaking evening... give away four bottles of wine
• Spring Time/Fall Time Clean Up – neighborhood dumpster with signage promoting you
• Easter egg hunt
• Junior A hockey party

Have fun with this approach. Use your imagination on what might work best for you and your area. Initially, it will take a fair amount of work to get your system in place. Repeating the same event 6-12 months later will prove to be much more automatic, especially when you have the ability to create and manage all aspects of a customer event using your CRM. This helps keep your costs low and makes it easy to replicate down the road.

Lastly, be sure to take lots of pictures or videos and post them on Facebook, etc. It's a great way to expand the added value you are offering. This also encourages the individuals who couldn't attend to take part next time. NO excuses.

To view the original article, visit the IXACT Contact blog.