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The Sheffield Crowd and Talking to Customers

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Remember the Date is an online greetings card company that initially started out as a date remembering service whereby users could create all their greetings cards in advance and then Remember the Date would send their cards out as and when required. This ensured that users would never forget to send a card again. Since launch, the business has pivoted several times, first by enabling customers to add a video message to their card and then by stocking the cards in various shops across Sheffield. The later change in how we run our business has proved successful with several other stores now poised to become stockists.

In the beginning

I started Remember the Date after a friend managed to forget to send a card to both myself and 2 other friends in a short period of time and thought that surely people cannot be that forgetful but that if one person could do it, there were surely others out there that has the same problem. I myself was always rushing around at the last minute and would usually just buy any card that I could find rather than taking the time to source a card that was relevant to the recipient. I started to do some research into buying behaviours and the sorts of cards people liked to buy.I also received (what I thought at the time) was good feedback from potential customers and people who wanted a date remembering, card sending service and further research showed that there wasn’t a card company that offered this service at that time. It took about 9 months in all to build the website and brand before I launched it at the ExCel Centre in London in March 2014.

We have now launched the range in the Students’ Union at Sheffield University and have interest from Hallam as well as independent shops in Sheffield and Rotherham and are now looking to expand the range of occasions that we offer.

The Sheffield Crowd
sheffieldcrowd

The Sheffield Crowd is The University of Sheffield’s new ideas exchange website, providing opportunities for all staff and students to develop, promote and support ideas and projects.

I first decided to post on the The Sheffield Crowd in order to get the brand out there and make it more recognisable. Being a small business means that I don’t have much of a budget for PR and Marketing so using the platform should hopefully make the brand more recognisable.

More recently, I’m hoping to use the platform as a market research tool to discover more about what customers want when buying greetings cards and also their motives behind them. I’m hoping to set up customer interviews in the next few weeks and am hoping the platform will help me recruit people who wouldn’t mind giving me an hour of their time in order to improve the business further. Remember the Date’s main focus has changed and we are now concentrating more on the relationship side of card giving, hence why our new tag-line is “Because relationships matter”. This is because the feedback I have received since launch has changed (maybe I’m asking better questions) but the majority of my feedback shows that purchasing a greetings card for a family member or friend isn’t something that should be rushed and that the time, money and effort should be reflected in the card and also be a representation of your feelings for the recipient. This has been incredibly useful information and I plan to use the platform to dig deeper into these insights in order to create a product that people truly want and need.

So how useful is it?

I have found the platform useful as users have already responded to Remember the Date’s page in the comments section, but I am guilty of not using the platform to its full potential. Over the next few weeks I am hoping to utilise it more as a resource by posting surveys but also recruiting for customer interviews, as I feel the best way to really get to know your customer is by talking to them. I’m also going to challenge myself to write more blogs on Remember the Date’s progress so that I can engage with Sheffield Crowd’s readers more.
If I could improve one thing on the platform it would be to have a direct messaging service similar to Twitter so that you can respond to comments privately if necessary especially as I want to conduct interviews in the coming weeks and some users may be reluctant to provide email addresses.


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