So I went to some schmooze fest and exchanged a few business cards with small business owners like me. I’m an attorney.
I guess marketing gurus say that for each business card I received, I should follow up with some personalized note saying how nice it was to meet them and to offer my services.
I received an email from one guy saying it was nice to meet me. My first reaction was that email was kind of a cheesy way to do it.
Another person, running a counseling-type service, put me on her spam email list for her business “newsletter” which contains many helpful tips on how to become more financially secure and generally happy in life. Maybe I will need some good counseling because spam pisses me off.
A travel agent sent me a generic postcard letting me know about exotic some getaways.
I would be more worried if people put you on email lists they sell than a quarterly or monthly newsletter (I do a quarterly and occasionally toss out a special maybe once per month).
Email cheesy…can be. My pov of cheesy vs cool is how much money per transaction are we talking about here. For example, my average customer is maybe $100 and up to 3-4 per day, the time and effort to send out personalized cards could get very cumbersome in a hurry.
People like real estate agents, lawyers, high end consultants, etc, have little excuse not to be more personal when their customers often are dropping thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars a pop on their services and quite often the list of customers per year may only be a couple dozen total.
I have been to plenty of chamber of commerce/etc type get togethers and a structured weekly meeting arrangement like bni has been a great bonus for me.
One thing I have had reinforced more than anything is, there is no substitute for happy customers.
In your case assuming you are new or looking to expand, I would think that one of the biggest things would be to make yourself available for some basic questions or engaging people at these meetings and asking them about things they might have wanted to consult an attorney about but didn’t because they were unsure where to go or scared of the price tag to find out.
For my customers I have scored alot of bonus points (with businesses) just popping in and checking if everything is ok when I am in the neighborhood, a few questions or a little 10-15 min fix…no charge. If I need to get into a more involved repair I do charge, but the customers usually happily pay up.