3 Reasons You Should Take the Time to Learn a Person’s Name
Learning the names of your clients and business partners is the best way to increase your revenue and customer retention.
What’s in a name? Everything when it comes to business. Learning the names of your business partners and customers will get you attention, create connections, and build networks. If you aren’t taking the time to learn people’s names in business, then people are less likely to take time with you.
While there are many changes coming to the future of sales and marketing, there are three reasons why learning names is still important for your business.
Names attract attention
Using someone’s name is one of the most effective ways to get a person’s attention. And getting someone’s attention is the first step to making a connection.
Dale Carnegie, famous author of How to Win Friends and Influence People knew this. Carnegie said that a person’s own name is “the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” Neuroscience research confirms this wisdom, showing we have unique brain activation every time we hear our names.
Personalization creates a connection
Using a person’s name creates a connection between you and your customer. Starbucks knows this. Why do you think they take all that time to write your name on a cup? They could easily give you a receipt number so you could quickly collect your purchase and go through the line faster. However, taking that extra time to ask and write your name creates a personal connection that encourages people to come back time after time.
Personalization also works with emails. According to a 2013 Email Market Survey by Experian Marketing, personalized emails for promotional mailings produce transaction and revenues rates per email six times more than impersonal emails. They also have 29% higher open rates and 41% higher unique clicks.
Names form networks
Learning names creates a database for your business network. For network success with names, look no farther than Harvey Mackay, author of Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive and The Harvey Mackay Rolodex Network Builder.
Harvey Mackay is famous for having a rolodex of over 6,000 contacts. Mackay not only had the names of his contacts, but also the names of their spouses, children, and important anniversaries. He could use the extra details to help him maintain close connections with his clients and business partners by being able to ask about their families and sending a card on their birthdays. Remember, it’s the personal touch that keeps people coming back.
Kyle Crocco is a Content Consultant in Santa Barbara for BigSpeak Speakers Bureau and Airtime Watertime®.
