Creative Corner & Business Bit: Keep in Touch With Your Customers - CTMH Monthly Newsletter

Creative Corner:

Here is a quick, easy card using Lollydoodle Bulk paper and A1150 Charming Chevrons.  The words come from C1540 Hello Blooms and C1543 Perfect Fit -Mom.  The stitching is from C1564 Stitch Wonder.  5 Bitty Sparkles add a bit of bling. Ink colors are: Slate, Sorbet, Cotton Candy, Gypsy, Sky and Pear.  The words can be changed to fit many occasions.




Business Bit:

This week has been pretty crazy here in Seattle with Super Bowl Sunday approaching! We sent off our Seahawks this week and we have been watching all the press conferences too. With all this craziness and attention, they understand that they need to focus at each practice to play their best on Sunday.

Just like our sports teams, even with all the craziness that is going on in our own lives, we need to focus and continue to live our lives so we can perform our best.  CTMH has provided an awesome tool to make keeping in contact with our customers Faster, Simpler and Easier!


Among the many tools that CTMH offers each of us, regardless of our title is a professionally done monthly newsletter that they will email to the customers in our databases.  We have the opportunity each month to personalize it with a 1000 character message and 1 photo.  Are you taking advantage of this great opportunity to touch base with your customers each month? 

• The first thing you need to to is to be sure you have a current email address for your customers.
• Second - Go into Order Entry and click on Customer Management - Edit Customers and make sure that the "YES" box is checked at the bottom of each entry where is says "send newsletter?"
• Third - go to Marketing - Newsletters - make sure the 1st box is checked that says "Send monthly newsletters to my customers"
• Below that it will tell you when the next newsletter will go out and how long you have to add your personalized message.
• As long as you have the first 3 steps done, a generic newsletter will go out to your customers.  You can view it by clicking on the link - "preview my newsletter" at the bottom.
• Step four is to add your personal message and a photo.  I use my iPhone to take the picture, edit it and email it to myself.

A bonus result for me is that it forces me to have my class samples for the upcoming month finished by the end of the month before.  I have found that it has decreased my stress for prepping for classes because I'm not struggling to get it done because I always know what I'm going to teach!  Most times I can even show my customers what they will be making the next month - it gets them excited to see the artwork in person. Many of them will place their orders online before they come based on the photo of the artwork and the monthly specials.  I have found that my online orders are substantially higher than orders taken in person.

Here is a list from our "Business Brainstorm" at the Oregon and Washington team meetings of ways you can use your 1000 characters and photo.  Leave me a comment and share how you use yours!

Ways to use your 1000 characters in the CTMH monthly customer newsletter

-make it personal.  Talk about: what we are doing, workshops, 
  creative ideas we are working on, what’s coming up

-use hyperlinks to blogs or websites of interest

-Use tinyurl.com (Facebook friendly) or bitly.com to shorten links
-create a picture collage to show off artwork so that it can be uploaded as 1 JPG

-go to picmonkey.com to make quick collages with their online software

 -Advertise your  Workshop dates/times

-Club advertising

-Personal notes/personal work as an enticement

-Special incentives you will offer

-Past activities done

- Bullet points (what it means to be a hostess/consultant, what is done at a gathering)

-Highlight a hostess

-Highlight a downline/upline- interview

-Your story-your "why"

-New Idea Book open house event

-Retreat promotion

-Thank you’s
If your comcast.net and yahoo.com e-mails bounce back and some customers cannot receive the newsletter you can supplement with “mail chimp”

-Put a link to your shopping site at the end to make it super easy for customers to shop!