Every Christmas, my father sends gift assortments from Swiss Colony to family members, friends, and former business associates. Last month, he shared with me an interesting story about how Swiss Colony handles repeat customers; which he gave me permission to retell here, because I think it’s a great example of a non-technical company using modern technology effectively.

He started out telling me about a woman who used to work for him 18 years ago, someone whom he has kept in touch with over the years, exchanging a few letters annually. He knew that she had moved recently, but had not yet received her new mailing address. However, when he received his most recent Swiss Colony catalog, he noticed that her address had been updated. He was suitably impressed.

One of my former jobs required me to send periodical mailings to a nationwide group of photojournalists, an activity that probably gave me more insight into business-based bulk mailing than any web application developer would ever care to have. But, it did leave me with an answer as to how her information was likely updated. It would seem that the company runs it’s entire recipient database through an automated service, such as Verimove, in order to keep their mailing address data fresh.

In addition to providing repeat customers with the list of all the recipients who had received gifts the previous year, they also include the previous year’s order for each recipient. It’s a refreshing change of pace from those companies that vacuum up a great deal of information about their customers but then don’t turn it around and use it effectively. Swiss Colony offers, even for it’s mail-order customers, the benefit of relational data.

Taking this a step further for the world of web development, this sort of information can be ideal to use as part of a ‘hook’ strategy to drive return traffic to an application. Instead of just emailing existing users to tell them about new products or services you provide, offer them value by doing a little bit of analysis on the relationships they already have in your systems, and making their experience more convenient.