Sunburst Logo LLC

This time let’s focus on the beauty of the resale. If your St Louis t-shirt printing company is anything like mine, you see the value in dealing with a second time customer. I would estimate that it’s  approximately 10 times easier to deal with someone you’ve dealt with before than it is someone new.

The reason I bring this up is that it’s such an easy approach to getting a repeat order. For example, you know them and they know you at that point and they realize that the job hopefully went well the last time they made an order so there’s no reason to think it’s not going to be a similar experience this time around. It is just a matter of picking up the phone and giving them a call and saying maybe something like this. “Hey bob, this is Mike. I don’t know if you remember me or not but when I tell you who I am, I’m sure you will. It was my company that processed your last digital t-shirt printing order and I was just curious if you thought you might be needing anything in the not too distant future? If so, would you mind if I could just have a chance to bid on it? The normal responses of course you can quote it! You did such a great job for us last time and we appreciate it. However, it might be another couple weeks before we’re actually ready to pull the trigger on that.” So just put that in your calendar to call them back in two or three weeks and it will be an almost guaranteed sale, especially if it’s the same exact item in the same quantities that they purchased last time and you simply keep the price consistent to the last order. Besides that, whenever I made a delivery, or if my customer would come to my shop to pick up the job when it was completed, I would make it a point to tell them that now that I have their logo on file, we would archive it and we can use it again on future orders as long as it doesn’t change in any way shape or size. In other words, it would require no setup charge for custom embroidery repeat orders. Why wouldn’t they use you again?

I also touched on not only giving them what they ordered initially, but throw in a little something extra as it goes a long way towards great customer relations. Not only that, but it’s a very soft way of planting a seed. Here’s what I mean by this. Let’s say they ordered approximately 72 custom short sleeve T-shirts and throw them in a free jacket. Not only will he be delightfully surprised and appreciative when he opens up the box and finds that jacket, but everyone else in the office will notice that he’s wearing it and ask how come they didn’t get one. It normally doesn’t take long before you receive an email for a jacket order from everyone else in the company.

I view that as salesmanship at its best. Not only that, but you made a new friend, who’s loyal and will likely never forget the fact that you initiated that. When you think about it, it’s actually applying Christian principles to your marketing campaign. How’s that you may ask? Because Christian principles actually teach that it is better to give than it is to receive. It also says if you give, it will be given back to you tenfold shaken and pressed together. Unlike the rest of the world, who tries to take as much as they can while giving as little as possible, this approach works exactly the opposite. It’s also an extremely pleasant way to do business.

I hope these strategies are helpful as the St Louis screen printing and embroidery industry is a tough one to break into. It’s all about trying to get an advantage and keep it over all the other companies in our industry that are showing the same thing. I just want to give you a heads up, to be watching for my next article in the next week or two, because we will be talking about the advantages of digital t-shirt printing as well as digital marketing to promote your business.