For quite some time now I’ve talked a lot about mailing handwritten cards to contacts, prospects, and clients. In fact, when I speak on stages across the country, one of the things I mentioned is the importance of going “From The Inbox To The Mailbox”. It’s a powerful approach to building relationships with others.
This isn’t rocket science by any degree. In fact it’s the personal touch that some people need to move to the next level of a relationship.
Especially when things are tough. Just this week, mid coronavirus pandemic, I had a call with a Financial Advisor. During the call we talked about relationship building techniques as we had in previous conversations. Our calls are at least monthly and we talk about the strategies to build better, deeper, more meaningful relationships. This Financial Advisor gets it. He’s all in on relationships. So it was great to hear about some of the results he was getting.
Just as schools started shutting down, he mailed handwritten cards to teachers in his contact database. In the card, he wrote a heartfelt message about how it impacted his daughter and how it was likely much more stressful for them, the teacher. He showed care for the stress they were about to be under, and he made sure to tell each of them how much he appreciated them!
He mailed roughly 20 cards.
He doesn’t normally get a big response from mailing cards. In fact, I see that all the time. The card is a “piece” of the overall relationship that inches the contact closer to referring or doing business. We were both very pleasantly surprised when he got a great response.
Within 60 days of mailing the cards, he had six people become clients moving $200,000 in assets to him to manage. Those six clients consisted of four direct contacts, and two referrals.
Another interesting results, three people replied to him with different messages that included “classy move”, “most thoughtful thing a business person has done”, and “Thank you for paying attention”
So, what’s this tell you? To me it says, mailing cards works, and you need to find a reason to mail a card, furthermore it takes time, and you should just focus on finding ways to care about others with the messages and reason you mail your cards.
Here’s your road map:
- Meet a contact
- Get contact information
- Mail a card
- Include a heartfelt message
- Repeat
This process alone will help you fire up your referrals, but if you want even more ideas, you can download two free resources at www.FireUpReferrals.com!