My topic for my three hour seminar: How to Build Relationships With Your Customer Using Your Brand …Virtually! While I was preparing my session, I was wondering: why would a customer want a relationship with their dry cleaner? It is about trust, and delivering great service, and caring.

But, then the night before I was flying out, I tried on my own suit. I couldn’t even squeeze into it. My dry cleaner had somehow shrunk it and I had just worn it to Toronto only two weeks ago. So, I either bulked up two sizes or it was ruined.

I mentioned this to Nora Nealis, the President of the NCA, and Ann Hargrove, who works with her (pictured above),  They said it was probably “wet cleaned”, and had shrunk (thank heavens it wasn’t that I’d bulked up 15  pounds), and she said to mail her the suit when I came back to Florida. I sent it out to her today.

They have a lab on West 29th Street, and they analyze these things, so they can send out information and help dry cleaners not to do this to their customers. I’m one of those  people who just  silently defects. So, I’m searching for a new cleaner.

The dry cleaners that attended this brainstorming event are always the best and the brightest. I told them how to give their websites and their businesses a “brand personality”, and invite people to interact with them online. They can build loyalty, by having some fun with their customers, and starting contests, selling ancillary products. Some had never discovered the magic of search engines, or even tried offering Pick Up and Delivery as an online option.

One website we created at Lois Geller Marketing Group is Apthorp Cleaners (http://www.apthorpcleaners.com), and the owner, Debra Kravet was there. The website features a lady in red walking her dog, and Debra Kravet has expanded that brand to appear as posters on her windows, and in direct mail invitations, and a host of other programs she’s working on now. Soon her New York City trucks will have her “lady in red” doing many pickups and deliveries… which is really a moving billboard for her business.

Please visit her website: www.apthorpcleaners.com

One gentleman there has a dry cleaners in Belize. It is the only one in that country, and he built it from scratch… never having been in the business. He showed us his commercials, and we were all impressed. Here’s someone who has used his great ingenuity to build something wonderful and employ many people. He does quality work too.

So, all in all…it is a joy to teach dry cleaners how websites, and blogs and social media can all help them build their community outreach, and relationships with their customers and prospects.

Ah, those were the days! One of my first DM jobs was at Greystone Press, a continuity publisher. We sold books in sets, one at a time, and billed customers monthly. Titles included the International Encyclopedia of Art, the International Illustrated Encyclopedia of Decorating. We also had gardening sets (that I wrote), and how-to handbooks.

And every day, the good ol’ USPS delivered mailbags filled with orders and, more important, checks. This was before normal everyday people had credit cards.

Orders and checks actually came right to our office in Manhattan and a bunch of people in the fulfillment area worked quickly to give us flash counts, daily, sometimes hourly.

It was exciting to hear that thousands of orders had come in, with checks, or that there were fewer cancellations than expected.

It was a joy to sit in the back room watching the fulfillment people outserting checks and writing up bank deposit slips. I loved finding out which of my programs was working best and which were lagging.

Now I call clients to ask how a mailing we did is faring out in the market and they often just don’t know yet… and maybe they’ll never know. “The data guy hasn’t put the numbers together, but there seems to be a lift, which may not be because of your mailing because so many responses are unidentifiable .” Which you wouldn’t think possible, would you?

We teach all this stuff at our Direct Marketing Boot Camps, and…

Our students are always amazed that we can figure out how much they can afford to pay to get a new customer (it’s called the direct marketing allowable). They’re astonished when we explain how to calculate what a program must do to be profitable (and how to recognize in advance when it’s not doable). Most of them tell us they thought it was a crap shoot and not a measurable science.

A lot of the magic of the old days of mailbags and checks is gone. Email and web results can be hard to track or source. Payments come in from PayPal, or they’re wire transferred into our business accounts.  But it’s not all gone. Maybe we can’t feel the gold trickle through our fingers anymore but it’s fun when we heard the unmistakable cha-ching on a client’s program.

It’s the still the key to the Joy of Direct Marketing.