By Lindsey Tolino

First grade jelly donut day was legendary. Our teacher put a jelly donut on each student’s desk. She explained how squeezing out a little jelly from the donut was similar to how we squeeze letters out of words to make contractions.

I have few memories from that age, but I will never forget sitting at my desk, in awe of the donut and my teacher’s wisdom.

Every time I think of elementary school, unique teaching methods, contractions or jelly donuts, I think of my first grade teacher. I think of how she cared enough for us to buy us donuts and how she made a correlation to contractions that I will always remember. No other elementary school teacher is as memorable to me.

In grad school I learned that you need potential customers to see an ad a certain number of times before they retain it or it influences them in some way. After too many impressions, it essentially becomes white noise and makes no impact on them.

To have your customers truly remember your business, you don’t need to follow traditional advertising and bombard them with typical sales copy.

You simply need to create a personalized, memorable experience.

That seems impossible though, right? It sounds like you don’t have the time for that. But it actually can be more simple than you think.

I had a personalized, memorable experience at a business just the other day.

I don’t think I had talked to anyone that morning except via text. It was late afternoon when I parked at the cafe. I was going to do some work. I felt fixated, machine-like. I walked up to the counter.

“Hi, is that your white car out there?” the cashier asked.

Expecting her to say my lights were on, I replied “yes” and looked outside at my car. No lights on.

“Oh, are you from Pennsylvania?”

“Yeah.” Oh, she had seen the license plate.

“Me too…”

We talked about where we were from, why we moved to Raleigh and how we were liking it. Through that short conversation, she moved me out of my one-minded, lonely, mechanistic mentality into feeling like a human again.

I was so thankful for her initiating that conversation. It was such a simple thing she did and yet it felt profound and memorable to me.

Traditional marketing has value, but creating a personalized, memorable experience for your customer is incomparably better.

So what is the key to creating a personalized, memorable experience for your customers?

The simplest, and perhaps the best way — you treat them like people.

My first grade teacher didn’t see us as students that she was obligated to teach contractions to. She saw us as children with senses (taste!), emotions and abilities. She created an experience she knew would be memorable for us that fit with her teaching objective.

The cashier didn’t see me as simply a customer she was obligated to wait on. She saw me as a person, from Pennsylvania like her, with experiences and a story. She reached out and connected with me as a person, when she wasn’t obligated to.

We simply need to see that our customers are not obligations to serve in order to make money from them. They are people with senses, emotions, abilities, experiences and stories. They are people that desire connection, respect, relationships and love.

If you thoughtfully care for them as people, you will naturally create personalized experiences for them. When customers feel cared for by you, it will be memorable.

They will come back because they will remember you.

Jelly donuts changed my world in first grade. A simple conversation with a cashier changed my perspective that day. It may take a smaller action than you think to be memorable to your customers. The key is simply caring for them as people.

Image credit: via Steve Campisi (http://www.freeimages.com/photo/758304).