Dealing with a hardwood supplier that knows you and provides you a custom tailored experience, either specific to your industry or based on your manufacturing process, can help you reduce unnecessary frustration or anxiety when it comes to replenishing your inventory.

Our leaders at Baillie Lumber work hard to ensure our team provides personalized buying experiences for our valued customers each and every day. In practical terms, this entails avoiding just one generic approach to offering, selling and fulfilling lumber. We believe in providing a variety of ways to interact with us, and perhaps most importantly, making the hardwood lumber buying experience as simple and easy as possible.

For example, here are a few best practices we try to emphasize.

Do our research. To provide a personalized buying experience for our customers we try to begin by incorporating a more in-depth understanding of their needs and pain points. Some ways we try to do this include:

• Reviewing past sales records to evaluate patterns of when and what purchases were made.
• Research any recent transactions and buying trends across the industry that are relevant to our customer and include that knowledge in future offerings.
• Leverage our knowledge of the customer’s needs and desires to make a targeted offer.

Make customized offers. For us this means offering customers custom width, length or color sorts. It could also mean offering special services such as surfacing or ripping. It could also mean offering a proprietary hardwood lumber grade product, or arranging a special shipping schedule or inventory management program.

What it means is for us to take the time and effort to customize the knowledge we know about the customer and package an offering that helps them save time and money in some fashion.

Also personalize to your customer-retention efforts. We find that personalization doesn’t have to be limited to new and potential hardwood lumber buyers. It’s also a very useful tool in helping with customer retention.

According to MarketingProfs, various retention strategies can include:

• Make it easy for existing customers to reorder, renew or extend a program.
• Personalized emails that, for example, that offer special limited offers.
• Offer rewards for customer loyalty, such as unique product packages or services.

“Small changes [in marketing and customer services] can make a big impact,” boosting loyalty and helping ensure that customers keep “coming back instead of looking elsewhere.”

Like all of you, we believe every customer is special. We find enlisting time and resources to personalize our approach makes a positive difference. Let us know if we can customize a hardwood solution for you!

Tony Cimorelli
Baillie Lumber Co.
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