The Marketing Value of Personal Recognition

I recently have been the lucky recipient of personal recognition as a valued customer. For many organizations personal recognition marketing gets regularly overlooked as one of the best and very cheap ways to spend marketing time and money.

Have you recently personally recognized a customer for their value? Without them you wouldn't be in business...

Example #1
I've written before on my transition to using a local bank (or credit union in my case) versus a big-impersonal-conglomerate-that-apparently-does-not-care-if-they-have-my-money-type-bank (aka Wells Fargo). Since switching to Wescom I have received now at least two (maybe three) personal letters from staff at the bank. I think it is important to note that it is not always from the branch manager but from the bank teller of my last visit. I have never banked at any other bank where the teller sends a "you are valued" letter.P.S. Despite what Chrystal says it is not because I'm Daddy-Big-Bucks. Not even close!

Example #2
When I switched from a PC to a Mac I found the need to have an MS Office compatible program with the hope to not pay through my nose for it. On the recommendation of a friend I downloaded NeoOffice and have been "reviewing it" for about 6 months. This week I came to the final conclusion that "it is awesome". I think it is awesome for two major reasons. First, all the functionality I need is there. Second, it's FREE! That's right, a FREE Office Software Suite that includes compatible versions of MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint, and MS Access. It also has a very basic Visio type program. I only use Writer (Word) and Calc (Excel) but I have not yet had a single compatibility problem. NeoOffice asks for donations to support keeping the software free, so upon deciding how useful it was I made a donation. I immediately received the below automatic email.
But then I also received a personal email from Patrick thanking me for my donation.
Oh, and for the record my very large donation was $100, which seemed really cheap considering it saved me the $400 expense of buying Office for Mac.