There’s a holiday for everything. From National Hug Day to National Cookie Day, it seems as if there are more holidays than there are days in the calendar! For business owners, there’s one holiday that should definitely receive a lot more attention than it does - Get to Know Your Customers Day.

One of the best ways to increase customer sales, loyalty, and retention is by connecting with your customers. Building a genuine relationship with your customers makes them feel valued and appreciated. Customers that you have a relationship with are more likely to stay loyal to your business and they may even be more likely to recommend your business to a friend!

In order to build a strong and lasting relationship with each and every customer, it’s important that you get to know your customers first. Getting to know your customers allows you to build a genuine connection with them. Taking the time to get to know your customers also lets them know that you truly do care about them. People love to feel seen and listened to and getting to know your customers does just this. 

The bottom line is that building relationships also build sales. 

Between running a business and all of the intricacies that go along with that, how do you find the time to get to know your customers? Well, luckily there’s a holiday dedicated to it – National Get to Know Your Customer Day.

If you didn’t celebrate customer day 2022, you should definitely celebrate Get to Know Your Customers Day 2023. Get to Know Your Customers Day is a dedicated opportunity for businesses to learn more about customers in order to build lasting relationships. 

So if you want to increase customer retention, loyalty and sales, this is a holiday that you should definitely mark down in your calendar.

While we’re on the topic of customer retention and loyalty, we have a story about customer success numbers gone awry…something that could’ve been saved by the celebration of Get to Know Your Customers Day…

A mystified marketing manager realized that she had a massive number of clients that were slipping away in his customer success report. These were all valuable, even seemingly loyal customers. It was baffling that they were no longer putting in repeat orders. What could be done?

The marketing manager knew she had to do something to increase those customer success numbers…

This problem definitely could’ve been fixed by building strong customer relationships. If only they’d thought to celebrate Get to Know Your Customers Day 2022. 

National Get to Know Your Customers Day takes place every year on the third Thursday of January, April, July, and October. Basically, it takes place on the third Thursday of every quarter. So National Get to Know Your Customers Day 2022 took place on January 20th, April 21st, July 21st, and October 20th. 

Instead of using a proven way of increasing customer success (building strong customer relationships by getting to know the customers), they had a different plan…

The Marketing Manager racked her brain to figure out what was going on. She was stressed and felt defeated. Could it be due to that annoying social media meme that went viral that happened to sound like their brand name that turned people off? 

It was up to her to fix this issue - her job may be on the line after all. What could be some good ways to bring back these clients, she took out a whiteboard and decided to brainstorm. She wondered, what would bring back their customers?

Her first idea was gifts. Gifts are always great for increasing customer success because it shows customers that you appreciate and value them. Now, this was certainly not a bad idea, but she wasn’t sure how to implement the gift idea quite yet.

If you’re looking for Get to Know Your Customer Day ideas, gifts are always an excellent option. Let’s be honest, who doesn’t love gifts?!

When choosing a Get to Know Your Customers Day gift, try your best to make it personal and thoughtful. A gift is an excellent opportunity to spark a conversation with your customer and learn a little bit more about them. 

Here are some great gift ideas for getting to know your customers better:

Curated Gift Basket

Choose a gift basket that’s unique to your brand of customers. You know your brand better than anyone, therefore you know what kind of customers do business with your brand. Choose a gift basket that you think your customer might enjoy based on their shopping preferences, buying habits, and any other information you already know about them. Giving your customer a gift basket is a great opportunity to continue the conversation about your customers' likes and dislikes. Not only does this help you build a better relationship with your customer, but you can also take the information you’ve learned about your customer and apply it to your business model if necessary. 

Custom Gift Bags

Once you’ve celebrated the holiday a few times and have gotten to know your customers a little better, you can really begin to customize your gifts. A fully-customized gift bag full of snacks, beverages, and other fun items makes a great gift for your clients and customers. This is an excellent way to show your customers that you’re actually taking the initiative to listen and get to know them on Get to Know Your Customers Day. 

So once you’ve got your gifts ready, how else can you take the initiative to get to know your customers better and build that crucial lasting relationship? Well, a great way to learn more about the people you do business for is with Get to Know Your Customers Day questions.

Now you may be wondering, what to ask on Get to Know Your Customers Day. 

Here are a few great questions to ask your customers: 

• What do you love about doing business with us?
• What feature do you wish our business had available to you?
• What are some services or products that you need that we don’t have?

You can personalize your questions to your business, or even the individual customer!

Another great way to get to know your customers better is with social media. Because let’s face it, a lot of us spend a lot of our time on social media. A Get to Know Your Customer Day social media post is also super helpful for building relationships with customers you don’t see in person.

Use your Get to Know Your Customers Day social media posts to build genuine connections and gain feedback on how your business can create a more positive customer experience. 

In the story we were telling you about earlier, the marketing manager added social media to her list of ways to improve customer success rates. Though she was a little nervous about adding social media to the list after the earlier social media incident that she thinks caused the drop in customer success rates. So she went back to her whiteboard and began planning other ideas…

Looking at all the ideas and painstakingly analyzing every angle, she came up with a strategic plan - long excel sheets, Miro boards, and Airtables were involved. The plan was to send out thank you gifts with each customer purchase and promote this incentive on social media. After all, social media is a great way to connect with customers.

When trying to get to know your customers better to increase customer success rates, social media platforms such as Instagram can be super helpful! Adding clever business captions for Instagram or small business captions for Instagram (if you have a small business) allows you to connect with your customers on Get to Know Your Customers Day Instagram style. Instagram captions for client testimonials or restock captions for Instagram are also super helpful!

Anyways, it turns out that all of that brainstorming and strategic planning on the marketing manager's end was for nothing…

After all that effort, the boss came to inform the marketing manager that she misread the report. It was not actually customers who were slipping away - it was actually loyal and VIP customers. But the plan was already in action… eventually the business did increase sales and offered a sweet raise too. So as it turns out, connecting with customers does work. Due to this, the business now celebrates National Get to Know Your Customer Day every quarter!