Episode 94: Engaging Your Clients During the Holidays

In this episode of The Pursuit of Badasserie: The Podcast, we dive into the importance of keeping our clients engaged and happy during the holiday season (and always). We’ll share practical strategies to maintain strong relationships, from personalized communication to thoughtful holiday offers. We explore how to make the most of this busy time of year by strengthening connections, increasing client loyalty, and ensuring that our clients feel valued and appreciated. Together, we’ll uncover ways to boost retention and set ourselves up for success as we head into the new year.

Let’s get after it!

In this episode, we discuss:

Communication and Engagement:

• Regular, transparent communication is crucial year-round.
• Personalized touches like remembering birthdays and favorite interests can deepen client relationships.

Showing Appreciation:

• Going beyond standard client satisfaction to build long-term engagement.
• Small gestures like handwritten notes or personalized gifts can have a significant impact.

Strategic Client Management:

• Identifying top clients and going the extra mile for them.
• Using tools like Google Alerts to stay updated on client interests and milestones.

Holiday-Specific Engagement:

• Tailoring interactions based on client preferences and cultural considerations.
• Offering unique holiday promotions or gifts that resonate with individual clients.

Building Lasting Relationships:

• The importance of consistent client engagement in building loyalty and advocacy.
• Strategies for maintaining client relationships throughout the year to support business growth.

Curious about learning more? Join us in The Holiday Hustle, a LIVE, 8-week course experience full of holiday revenue-generating guidelines, proven marketing framework, and stand-out pricing strategies to create the best holiday sales season for your business yet!

https://www.badassamplifier.com/holiday-hustle

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Read the full transcript of this episode below:

Lynn Howard  

Hey, I’m Lynn

Amanda Furgiuele  

And I’m Amanda. Welcome to The Pursuit of Badasserie: The Podcast. We are talking about the holidays in August, gangster style. That’s how we do.

And we’re going to talk today a little bit more about less about prospecting and more about your current client base, because the last thing you want to do during the holidays is forget your OGs, your original people who’ve been with you, you’re trying to choose all of your existing clients.

We don’t want to let them down as we try to prospect for new people during the holidays. So let’s talk about our clients and how to keep them during the Absolutely.

Lynn Howard  

Now I do want to preface though, Amanda, that this should be all year round. You should have client, and not just about client satisfaction, but engagement with your client, you should have all these points kind of systemize or a lot of them.

But during the holidays, you might get extra special. Extra special, can’t even talk because I’m so excited. But extra special, because they are the ones who are paying your bills right now.

That’s how you’re making your money. And we see this time and time again, people do not pay enough attention to their client.

It’s either in two buckets, I think, in two kind of things. Either they only pay attention to their clients and not client acquisition, or they only pay attention to client acquisition and don’t pay attention to their clients.

Why don’t you say so right now?

Amanda Furgiuele  

It’s my bill. Absolutely. It’s my blowing because you need both. You need your original people. You need that foundational money coming in, and you always constantly be prospecting because things change, people move, people change,

their minds, they grow out of the product that you’re selling, you sell diapers or the kid grows up, there’s always a season reason that people will move on and you need to be prepared for that obviously, but you don’t want to neglect the money that’s coming and you don’t want to bite the hand that feeds you.

Lynn Howard  

Absolutely. Okay, so one of the first points that I would like to address is the communication aspect. We do not communicate necessarily with our clients enough and probably not in the right ways.

Now feedback, you know, like feedback forms and different check-in points is okay, but you know, what was the last time you, if you’re B2B, business to business, you dropped in and had a conversation with your client?

B2C, what was the last time you sent them a message just for the heck of it and said, how are you doing?

What’s new? You know, effective communication, it should be regular, it should be transparent, it should be proactive on your behalf.

You should not. wait for the problem to happen for your client to come to you. You shouldn’t be just communicating to your client when you’re selling something or raising your prices.

Like it should be an ongoing engagement that you can absolutely set up and you can streamline some of it.

But even like, I know, I used to keep specific notes on my high level clients and I knew when their birthdays were, I knew what their favorite colors were.

I knew what their behavioral style was because that’s the way I think. I knew different personal aspects to them.

So that way I can just send them a random like happy anniversary, know, realtors, really good realtors are great at this because they’ll send them, oh, you’ve been in your home one year or congratulations on your wedding that we see coming up.

Like they stay engaged in their clients kind of even in the peripherals and then communicate with them long term.

Amanda Furgiuele  

Absolutely. And you know, this is like a little pro tip depending on your client base. I like to put up a Google alert in my email for particularly if the high of a high profile client who’s going to be in the media.

So I absolutely put a Google or anytime their name pops up anywhere in Google, I get notified. But even on like things that are really interesting, if it’s an article about something that they are interested in, going the extra mile can really make them feel valued and taken care of.

it it doesn’t take much effort on my part to look up an article on something that interests them or to, you know, give them feedback on the school their kids going to or vacation they were thinking about taking like there’s there’s lots of things I can put Google alerts on.

But it’s a really easy way for you to get notified of things that you might be able to pass on to clients.

I use it all the time, I might, my port inbox is just flooded with Google alerts and various things.

But it’s a really interesting hack you can use in order to to find topics to engage with your clients.

And it doesn’t have to be hard to go the extra mile in that way. And when it comes down to really retention, I always, you don’t want to really put all your eggs in one basket, but I like to look at my top 10% every quarter.

Who are my top 10% earners or buyers or whatever? I can, who are those people? And how can I go the extra mile for them?

If they’re the top 10 spend, a top 10% spending or attending depending on or like frequenting business, that’s not always about the top dollar, but maybe they’re, maybe they came into my store a hundred and seventy and seven times in 200 days.

those people, I want to keep an extra eye on because they are more likely to convert to other things when I do want to sell.

That’s not the only reason I want to be nice to them. I’m not just being nice because I want to convert them.

Lynn Howard  

But they, they’re showing a pre- So why wouldn’t you want to show up for them differently? I think that they’re, yeah.

Amanda Furgiuele  

so just keeping your eye on some of those things. it’s obviously you want to do good things for all of your existing people.

But if you have that top 10% as well, you might want to go just a little bit above for them as well.

And that could just be something as simple as a personalized letter or a text on their birthday or taking them out to coffee if you’re.

Lynn Howard  

Which you can pre-do, you send out cards a lot too. I mean, there’s other type of vendors that you can use besides that.

Amanda Furgiuele  

But yeah. Yeah, there’s so many things you can do that it’s worth the effort in time. And I know I have heard before, probably for myself, 15 years ago, that it was a lot.

Like, oh, it’s one more thing to do. It’s one more thing to do. But this is a big thing because these are your people.

These are the people who are eating you. So you want. to stay in the know with what’s going on with them and go the extra mile for them.

And I absolutely believe that’s even more so during the holidays because it is such a sentimental time. And you can’t always go beyond like buy the most spa packages or take them to a, you know, let’s all go to a tropical island.

Like it’s not we’re not Oprah. We’re not taking our team and our top people over not doing Oprah’s favorite things yet.

Or you get a car, you get a car, we’re not doing that yet. And there are still things you can do to show people that you care and to show people that you’re thinking about them, even something as simple as a handwritten, not typed out handwritten note that goes a long, long way for something as simple that probably cost you, you know, two dollars and fifty cents in paper and postage.

So just, well, maybe not now, but you get the idea that point is, though the extra mile doesn’t have to be expensive, it doesn’t

to be consuming, but it does need to come from a place of genuinely, genuinely appreciating what they have done for you to get you where you are.

Lynn Howard  

Yeah, speaking of that whole expressing gratitude, you can also do like a special loyalty program. You can give a special discount, the personal I think you know, a messages.

You know, like I said, if it’s B to B back in the day, I used to love baking cookies and like actually a bunch of my my girlfriends who are in small businesses, we’d all get together and we bake a ton of cookies and then separate them all.

So we would have everybody else’s cookies. We create little cookie bins for our high level clients or maybe medium level clients, depending on you have to go kind of with industry standard too.

Like some type of industries are going to have a lot more clients than like realtors or contractors are not going to have as many.

So how you do things might be slightly different, your top 10% might. turn into your top 50% or your top 1%.

So you kind of, you have to like determine that with your classification where you’re at financially as well. But at the end of the day, all of these points are just really good at like building your client, because we didn’t even cover this.

And I know I’m jumping around, but having better clients isn’t about more retention, but it’s also they’re your mouthpieces.

going to be your biggest advocate. They can bring on more business. So not only are you hopefully increasing the longevity of their business with you, but you are also increasing the probability that they’re going to bring in or be your mouthpiece for others.

It helps make you more rooted. Yeah, showing appreciation. One of my favorites, and they did this, I know they do this kind of all over, but in Hawaii, was really big, and we were smaller to me, but they would do the best of the best of West Hawaii, the best of this.

And so whenever My clients would get that and receive that or even be nominated. I would make the majority of them by postcards with a special thank you to say, you were a part of this, we appreciate you.

We’re showing appreciation, yet still edifying what we’ve done, so that way they know that we’re so relevant or my client.

But it’s still saying, listen, it’s because of you that I was nominated. It’s because of you that I want.

Right, so you can show appreciation in many different ways, even just nowadays with the text or being friends on LinkedIn and sending them a message or a voice note, a voice note over an email is always going to be better, right?

So think of creative ways that you can continue to show appreciation, while also building a relationship with them. So we didn’t even go into that, but we’ve been covering different aspects of that.

Now, again, classification dependent, also position dependent, and community dependent. Some people will build relationships more with their customers. others, but you need to have some kind of, you should, you don’t need to, you should have some kind of strong, at least trustworthy relationship with clients by showing genuine interest in them, but also another way, because a lot of things fall through the cracks, especially during the holiday season is following up following through with your commitment, and even more so make sure that you’re being the proactive one about that reminding them that their hair is due to be, you know, highlighted, reminding them that, you know, to not forget to change their batteries out of their smoke checkers, whatever it is, like, be that person, you want to continue to build relationships.

Amanda Furgiuele  

Absolutely. And the relationship building, as we said before, it doesn’t have to be huge grand gestures. It can be very small, thoughtful things that you, and, you know, I used to work for, I used to do some work with, with the montage, so the montage

resort. And I remember doing my orientation in the beginning 25 years ago, so it a long time ago. A long time ago.

So I remember doing the orientation and there was this whole hours long orientation on the wow factor. And what they used to do at the montage is they wanted you to learn people’s pictures.

you had to you got a portfolio of every high-end client that was coming in and there were a lot of high-end clients in Hawaii.

So with all the pictures you have to learn their names, you have to learn everything about them. It was like a CIA dossier.

had to learn how many kids they had. Where did their kids go to school? times were their kids in?

We had to learn everything. I thought it was super intrusive. this is really creepy. That’s what I thought. And it was, to be honest, it was a big creepy.

However, the whole point. whole platform that they stand on was they want you to wow people with the tiny details that you pull up.

And so they would give you these scenarios where it’s like, okay, Susie Q is coming into the hotel. What can you do to make her feel special if the second she arrives?

And I’m like, okay, Susie Q has three kids who are on three different time zones in college and she’s going to be here for a month.

I’m going to put three separate clocks in that in the room with each of her kids names on it.

So she knows exactly what time she can call her kids. And I’m going to put like, I’m going to put her favorite flower shoe really like Slickardenius.

We’ll put the, like, you know everything and you make sure that that room is set. So when they arrive, they know that you know them.

And yes, it’s a little bit creepy, but they also really appreciate it. And not every touch is super creepy.

Lynn Howard  

every touch is like, I know where your family lives.

Amanda Furgiuele  

But, but just being able to say like, hi, Susie, can I get you? I mean, I know your favorite drink is a mojito.

Would you like one? right now I can I have an order for you like you just got here like or having that drink ready when they arrive at the hotel because you know it’s their favorite those kinds of things they know this choosing the lavender soap in their bathroom instead of the plumeria or whatever so those kinds of small things getting to know your family makes a huge very why however getting to know those small things made a huge difference and they people came back and they raved raved about the service because every single employee in that hotel knew the name of every single person who came in was a lot of studying to do yeah I was back in college then it was like more studying than I ever wanted to do for a job but let me tell you the tips were better the engagement was better those clients were incessantly repeat customers and those kinds of tiny touches I have felt that training for the rest of my life when it comes to dealing with and creating relationships with my clients so you know I hate it

Lynn Howard  

it back then because I felt so creepy knowing everything about everybody and it changed the way I thought about customer service to this day and like I said that was like in the early 2000s maybe even the 1900s oh my god maybe even the 1900s a long time ago that’s hilarious um absolutely though you know people want to be seen and heard even if they’re super independent even if they’re super wealthy even if they’re not like it is a human basic need to want to be seen and heard and to feel a value and especially when somebody is paying you for products and services they they want to still they want to feel it even more and so those little touches like I said I used to keep little notes on all my clients too and on their folder because I used to roll a deck I know I had the old school filing system because you know with the alarm company and stuff but

I did have Rolodex, too.

Amanda Furgiuele  

I had a Rolodex.

Lynn Howard  

That was for my business starts. But I would have like all what they like. I even had allergies because I have a specific allergy.

So I don’t like I had allergies. Like if I was going to deliver cookies this person and somebody in their house is allergic to nuts, I’m not delivering them cookies.

going go buy them chocolate. So I’m going to something else. So absolutely, especially during the holidays, because even if people are bought humpbook and not into holidays with all of the holiday spirit around, it can increase them to be the more about humpbug or you know, it’s really nostalgic.

So that’s another thing like with keeping clients happy, especially during the holiday season. You know, we talk about this in other podcasts.

It’s like building on that nostalgia will absolutely help you engage with them in a different way. But essentially at the end of the day, you want to keep your clients happy by proactive communication, building relationships, showing appreciation, personalize.

that feels personalized. doesn’t have to act. It doesn’t have to necessarily be personalized. just feels personalized. being ahead, constantly delivering your value and above within reason, because we train others how to treat us.

We don’t want you to under promise over deliver all the time. But you definitely want to do it in a way that you’re being proactive in your client engagement and keeping them happy with client satisfaction.

Client satisfaction is so such a burned out type of term that is so much more. It’s more about client engagement.

It’s more about the client journey versus client satisfaction. You definitely want them to be satisfied, but you want them to be engaged and happy.

Amanda Furgiuele  

Yeah, be engaged. And honestly, I’ll say, I’ll take engaged over happy any day because you can’t always have control happiness, but you can control engagement.

So you can control how many times you’re emailing them, how many times you’re reaching out, the types of emails you’re sending, you know, even if one thing I love to do is during the holidays, depending on the type of

business you have. If you have lower-end products or services or digital products, I like to give gifts of my own services to other people.

So it’s, for example, I own a fitness business. So one of the things I love to give is like, oh, here’s five free classes that you can give out as gifts at your office.

So, like, taking care of their shopping list with things that they didn’t have to pay for that technically benefit you, super bonus.

If they never use them, you know, all it cost was the printing. But if they use them, you might have an opportunity to have five or six or ten or a hundred new prospects coming in that already have a glowing recommendation that someone’s going to talk about.

Like, don’t be afraid to reach out in creative ways and to you, you know, really capitalize on those connections, relationships that you have built.

Because ideally, you’re nurturing them over the whole year. So by the time the holiday season comes up, they are stuck.

folks to have that from you. And they’re wanting to share that.

Lynn Howard  

Yeah, I mean, the building relationship, and we I know we talk a lot about this, but I love that idea.

And I know you kind of set it from two points. But I do want to emphasize, you can only just give your own products and service, but you can give your clients products and services, or purchase from them.

To be able to give away. So instead of we love Starbucks for the nostalgia part, but instead of purchasing from your local Starbucks purchase from a local vendor who is your client.

Instead, right. And so you’re building relationships in different ways. And it, to me, and I’m sure you agree, Amanda, just during the holiday season, all these low nuances and nuggets go a bit further, or can go a bit further.

And they can also break it.

Amanda Furgiuele  

Yeah, they can absolutely they can make a break you just like anything else to make a break you. But yeah, absolutely.

I used to buy I used to buy a client who owned a massage. School and I used to buy massages for all of my clients from my client who sold massage So I mean Keep it in the family is what I used to call it.

It’s keeping all in the family. Let’s keep it in theana Let’s keep it keep it. I mean it works like gangbusters like there was a lot of I mean not only from a building relationship standpoint But also from a cross-promotion later becoming strategic partners in that way, so there’s a lot of Ways you can create those connections and build upon them that are strategic not just good-natured and wonderful and making you a good person But also strategic because I had said It’s not always good-hearted I feel you know like pretty much with every topic that we just speak about we know we can keep going on But these are just some of the nuggets to help you Keep your clients happy Throughout the holidays, but it’s absolutely some of these can be streamlined and like Amanda said alerts put on

Lynn Howard  

different things can be done. So that way throughout the whole year, you have some kind of client engagement. You’re always looking at from a proactive stance.

And a, how can I see how can I hear them? Right? Active listening, being proactive with the problem problem solving if there is problem solving, et cetera, et cetera.

So that way your clients will say longer and be happier and absolutely be your word of mouth or your mouthpieces on the street passing you business.

we hope you got a bunch of nuggets out of this particular podcast.

Amanda Furgiuele  

And I have one more that just just occurred to me. know I have a couple too, but I was like, I know, I’m just going to say this one because it’s not all about Christmas.

If you know your your client or your your your person does not celebrate Christmas or celebrates best or whatever.

Take that consideration too. Because that also I mean, you might send out your your holiday. whatever promotion. But if you know they’re celebrating something else on a specific day, it goes a long way to really send them something individual to their particular release as well, if you know.

Lynn Howard  

100%. And if they don’t believe in the holidays at all or anything, actually, we’re doing a poll right now and somebody responded, none of the holidays are my favorite.

And I was like, well, which one is your favorite? And he’s like, I don’t have a favorite. They’re absolutely like, I get you.

And so if he was a client of mine, what I would send him would be very different than the client to do celebrate during the holiday season.

So again, it’s just a bit more stressful, even if they don’t celebrate during this end of the year, even in the hustle and bustle, like it does change people get out of their minds, man, it is insane.

And that does affect others. So I love that last point, Amanda absolutely. And how you know this is because you keep notes on your clients, you have

communication and you’ve built a relationship with them. So yeah, yeah. All right. So until next time, get after it.