Humanizing Yourself to Your Customers

In general, the more you're able to show your customer that you're a real person, with real goals and dreams, the better. A monthly email or postal newsletter, on top of all the product offers you make, can be a real help in this situation. Now, we don't have an official company newsletter at Unstoppable Marketing, but I'm about to initiate a quarterly for my best customers that will be packed full of tips, tricks, and strategies for making them more money. I'd like our customers to get to know us, because the more they do, the more they'll like us and trust us—which ultimately leads to them buying more from us.

The challenge in our marketplace is that consumers often want to turn us into commodities, so we can be easily compared to other companies, and their respective products and services. Our goal is to fight against this, to differentiate ourselves so much so that they know we're real people who really care about them, people they like doing business with. Nobody loves companies, but people love people. So it's our task as marketers to become three-dimensional, living, breathing human beings to them. It's hard to hug an amorphous company. So when I play the character "Kent Sayre" in my sales letters, it's an exaggerated form of myself, designed to bond the customer to me.

How can you do the same thing? I'm not talking about divulging personal details or having anyone invade your privacy, just giving your customers enough information so they can see you and your employees are great people to do business with. For example, you could chronicle some of your customer service reps' heroic acts in going the extra mile. You could give your customers a glimpse into the daily life of your office, or discuss plans for expansion. You could profile successful customers, and discuss how your products have helped them. If you can let them get to know you, they'll come to like and trust you more…and this will result in more sales.

For my part, I plan to use more photographs and tell more personal stories than ever before. And I'm thinking about doing a list something like "21 Unusual Facts About Kent You Probably Never Guessed." The idea driving this is that as our customer reads it, they see things in themselves they have in common with me, and go, "Oh, wow! Kent and I are quite alike! This means I should order now!"

I want to be like a magnet, a polarizing force attracting who I want to work with (good customers and go-getters) and repelling those I don't want to work with (deadbeats and program-hoppers). I don't want to be perceived as having a blasé, bland personality…and neither do you.