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The proper use of testimonial letters can
add credibility for your company and
profitability to your bottom line. Many
sales organizations fail to use this simple
yet cost effective method to reach new
markets and clients. The formula to obtain
testimonial letters is quite simple. The
best time to ask for a testimonial letter is
right after the sale has been made. This
prevents the dreaded “Buyers Remorse” and
reinforces the decision the client has just
made to do business with your company.
One way to do this is to ask the client to
write you a testimonial letter to include
their candid comments about their experience
with your product or service and even about
their experiences with your sales and
customer service representatives. Regardless
of how you do it, the letters’ content can
act as a powerful motivator and training
tool for your employees. If a letter is
returned with positive comments, it can be
displayed at the office to highlight the
exemplary behavior of that specific employee
which should help to drive other employees
to model these types of experiences to
current and future customers. If the
behavior is inappropriate or inconsistent
with the image you are looking to portray,
this will be an excellent time to address
the behavior with the employee and provide
corrective behavior coaching. In many cases,
without the benefit of this type of
feedback, you might not have been aware of
this behavioral issue.
Use Your Company Database to Mine for
Prospects
For a Personal Testimonial Letter
You can use your current company database to
mine for customers’ contact data, which then
can be used to create direct mail pieces as
part of a testimonial letter campaign.
Database marketing, explains business writer
Mark Hendricks, aims "not to make the sale,
but to keep the customer." The underlying
technique is to use database records of
customers' latest purchases and frequency
and amount of past purchases, to create
targeted mailers that let you stay in touch
with your customers. The most popular of
these mailers are listed above. But
another type of mailer, which is fast and
inexpensive to produce,
often proves the most powerful of all:
personal testimonial letters.
The power of a Personal Testimonial Letter
A personal testimonial letter, as advocated
by Jay Levinson, is a one-
page letter that recaps what a customer has
just purchased and
then describes their overall satisfaction
with your company’s products or services the
customer has just purchased - or simply
provides helpful professional information.
It conveys, in short, what your product or
service has done for that customer in the
way of
service, attention and expertise.
If you want to make maximum impact on your
testimonial letter campaign with your
customer database, take the time to
concentrate on customers individually by
writing them letters personally tailored to
their specific situation. Mention that
you'll phone in a week to follow up on
the letters you just mailed or emailed on
matters you've broached. For extra impact,
add a handwritten P.S. recapping your main
message. Statistically, if nothing else is
remembered, the “PS.” will be! If you follow
these tried and tested marketing methods to
obtain more and better testimonial letters,
you will see a dramatic increase in customer
loyalty and profits to your bottom line. |
