Customer notes
Notes to your best customers
A note to your best customers has a specific failure mode: it reads as a loyalty-programme artefact rather than as a person writing. Anything that sounds like a tier, a status or a points balance undoes it, because your best customers are the ones most exposed to that language everywhere else.
Written by Autopen Australia · Updated
To a long-standing retail customer
[FIRST NAME], you have been coming in since [YEAR] and I do not think we have ever said thank you properly. So: thank you. [SIGNATORY], [ROLE]
Where you know what they always buy
The strongest version. Specificity is the entire signal that this is not a merge.
[FIRST NAME], we have put aside [PRODUCT] from the new run for you. No obligation and no rush - it is just that you have bought every previous one and it felt odd to let it go out without telling you. [SIGNATORY]
To a high-value account, from the owner
[FIRST NAME], [BUSINESS NAME] has been one of our largest accounts for [NUMBER] years and I wanted that acknowledged by me rather than by a system. Thank you. My direct line is [NUMBER] and it is genuinely direct. [SIGNATORY], [ROLE]
After a very large single purchase
[FIRST NAME], thank you for the [PURCHASE]. It is a considerable thing to spend and you had other places to spend it. If anything is not right, ring me first. [SIGNATORY]
Getting it right
- What to mention. Something only somebody who knows the account would write. Their actual buying pattern, the thing they always order, the branch they use. Signed by a named person with a position.
- What to leave out. The word VIP, which nobody has ever enjoyed being called. Tier names. Early access framed as a reward, which converts the note into a promotion.
- How long. 30 to 60 words.
- How personal. Familiar without being presumptuous. The test is whether you would say the sentence to their face.
- When not to send one. At the same time as everybody else. A note that goes to your top customers in the same week as the general Christmas card is identifiable as a tier within a day, usually because two customers compare them.
Personalising more than a handful
The fields that earn their place here: [FIRST NAME], [PRODUCT], [YEAR], [BUSINESS NAME], [SIGNATORY].
Top-customer segments are usually built on spend over a fixed window, which quietly includes people who made one very large purchase and have not returned. A note implying a long relationship, sent to somebody who bought once, is read as a sales approach. Segment on frequency as well as value.
Before any run, read the piece with the longest value in your data, the shortest, and the empty one. If all three read as English the merge is sound. Personalising direct mail at scale covers the rest.
Sending these at volume
A top-customer list is deliberately short, which is exactly why these are worth writing properly and exactly why they stop: two hundred notes is small enough to feel manageable and large enough never to be finished.
Autopen Australia writes each piece individually with a real ballpoint, personalises every piece from your list, written into the sentence rather than dropped into a gap and hand-addresses the envelopes.
Two hundred notes that never quite get written? See what they would look like
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Writing more of these than you have evenings
Tell us roughly how many and what they say. We will come back with an exact price and a production window.