Give Your Clients Something Physical (Even If What You Sell Isn't)

A card on a client’s birthday, a journal that arrives the week before a program starts, a printed page that shows up every month with their name on the envelope: something a client can hold keeps you in their week between sessions. It sits on the kitchen counter, it comes up on your next call, and it shows them you had them in mind while they were busy with everything else.

Plenty of coaches, consultants and practitioners have wanted to send clients something like this. For many of them, one small, specific gap sits under that wish: their client list holds names and email addresses, because a signup form asks for exactly that by default, so there is no mailing address to send anything to.

For the clients already on your list, you can ask by email. For everyone who signs up from here on, the fix is to collect client mailing addresses on a form they already fill out. Add fields for the address, have the form tag each person who signs up (a tag is a marker on each contact that you can filter by later), and when it’s time to send something, filter by that tag and export a list with every address attached. In AttractWell, a client’s purchase, their tag and their address all land on the same contact record, so the list you print labels from is one filter and one download away.

Want to see it done start to finish? In the video below, Coach Ashley, who hosts the Build with AttractWell video series, walks through the whole setup, down to an address list exported for labels. Jump straight to the video if you’d rather watch first.

To follow along in your own account, you can start a $1 trial and have a signup form collecting addresses this afternoon. Bring whatever you’re building to Office Hours, our live group call every Thursday at 2pm ET, and we’ll look at it with you.

Much of a coaching relationship happens in scheduled time: the session, the call, the module a client sets aside an hour for. The rest of their week belongs to everything else in their life. Of everything you send a client, only mail arrives in that part of the week as an object in their home. A client finds it when they get in the door, opens it when they choose, and keeps whatever they want to keep.

It also carries a signal clients read at a glance: someone chose this, paid to send it and addressed it to them by name. A client can’t watch you prepare for their session or see the thought you put into their program between calls. Something from you that they can hold is care they can see.

For a program, the effect starts before the first session. A journal that arrives the week before a cohort begins means week one opens with something in their hands, and a printed workbook gives a six-week program something clients can hold and write in. An object from you is also a reason to talk about you. Clients mention a card on their next call, and they show a journal to the friend who asks what they’re working on.

Mail also lets you choose the moment. A card timed to land the week a client finishes your program, a note before a milestone they mentioned on a call, a small package the week a client renews: each one arrives around a moment you picked, for a reason the client recognizes, and the reason is what makes it personal.

Almost everything worth mailing a client falls into one of three kinds, and each one depends on the same thing: an address on file before the moment arrives.

Mail with nothing to sell. That means a card on a birthday, a note after a client finishes something hard, or a holiday card to everyone you worked with. Nothing is being offered, so it reads as exactly what it is. The people you’d send it to often bought something with no physical part at all, so no form ever asked where they live. Our list of year-end client appreciation ideas covers what to send once you have somewhere to send it.

Something in the hands of everyone in a program. A journal, a book or a printed workbook that arrives before a cohort starts means the program begins with an object on the table. The address has to be on file before the package ships, and asking at signup means it already is.

Something you already write, sold in print. Printed newsletters that people pay for by the month have a long history in marketing, and a coach who already writes regularly can offer one: a monthly letter with its own price that arrives in the mail. It renews every month and puts your name on a client’s counter twelve times a year. That third kind is the one built in the video.

The address is what the three have in common. It comes in on a signup form and lives on the contact record. A tag then decides who gets which mailing: every client for the holiday card, one cohort for the journal, the paying subscribers for the newsletter.

Cost and logistics sound like the obstacles, and both can be planned for. A card costs a card and a stamp, a printed newsletter can carry a price that covers its own printing and postage, and the cost of a journal for everyone in a program can go into the program’s price. Print-on-demand services make and ship a journal one copy at a time, mailing services take a spreadsheet and send a letter to everyone on it, and a small list fits on a sheet of labels from your own printer.

The one part no service can supply is the list itself. A signup form asks for a name and an email by default, because that’s what an online program needs to deliver itself. So a client list can be complete for every purpose except mailing, and the gap only shows up on the day you decide to send something.

You can email past clients and ask for their address, and some will answer. The steadier fix is to ask while people are already filling out a form, so the address comes in with the signup itself. The sooner the fields go in, the fewer people you’ll ever have to chase.

Asking at signup also gives you the moment to say what the address is for, whether that’s a journal before week one or a card now and then. When the package arrives, it lands as something they were told to expect.

In AttractWell, the signup form on a page can ask for more than a name and an email. A mailing address takes five short text fields: street address, city, state, postal code and country. Each field can save its answer to the matching address field on the contact record. Whoever fills out the form then has their address on their contact record, next to their name and email.

Put the fields on whatever form your clients already fill out. For anything they buy, that’s the checkout form on its sales page, whether or not the offer ships anything, and the address arrives with the sale. For something free, like a download or a first call with you, it’s the signup form on that offer’s page. The fields are the same either way, and so is everything that follows.

When a purchase ships something, the address fields can be required on that form, so no order comes in without somewhere to send it. Anywhere else, paid or free, you can leave them optional and still collect an address from the people who want mail from you.

Then tag the group when they join. On a sales page, the checkout applies a tag to everyone who buys, and a free signup form can apply one too, so every group you might mail sits in your contacts under its own name. The tag is how you find exactly these people later, whether that’s one cohort, one subscription or every client from one program.

While you’re adding fields, ask for anything else a mailing needs. A short text field for a birthday, for instance, lets you plan the first kind of mail a year ahead.

On a stack of separate tools, each one keeps its own piece of the person: a checkout like Stripe or PayPal keeps the payment and whatever it asked at checkout, and an email platform like Kit or Mailchimp keeps your subscribers, their tags and whatever its forms asked. A mailing that reaches across both, like a holiday card to every buyer and every free subscriber, means exporting from each and combining the lists, or connecting the two so they stay in sync.

In AttractWell, it’s one contact record. The purchase on your sales page, the tag it applies, the address from the form and any follow-up email you set the checkout to send all attach to the same person in the same account. When you want to send the next issue to your paying subscribers, you filter your contacts by their tag and export, and the file carries their addresses.

That also makes a tag a standing definition of a group rather than a one-time list. Run the same filter in three months and it returns the whole group, including everyone who joined since, with nothing rebuilt. When someone cancels, you remove their tag, and they drop off the next mailing.

When it’s time to send something, the work is short. Filter your contacts by the tag and you have exactly the group you meant: this cohort, these subscribers, these clients and nobody else. Export that filtered group, and the file comes out carrying the mailing address of everyone who gave one, ready for whatever does your mailing.

Because the tag goes on at the moment someone buys or signs up, the filter returns exactly the group that tag names: filter by the newsletter’s tag and you get the people who subscribed, and nobody who only picked up a free download.

From there, the file goes wherever you mail from. Upload it to a print service that sends the whole list, hand it to an assistant, or open it in a label template and run a sheet of labels through your printer. The step that stalled the idea, having the addresses at all, is already done.

A regular rhythm keeps it light: pull the list, send the cards or the next issue, and let the tag carry everyone who joined in between into the next round.

The video builds the offer a member of the AttractWell community asked about, a paid monthly newsletter that arrives in the mail, and builds it on Coach Ashley’s own account. AttractWell has AI built in that writes pages and emails. The sales page and the follow-up email in the video are written by that AI from the offer details saved in AI Settings, the settings screen where you tell the AI what you sell. The button that has the AI draft the email is called Write for me. AI Settings is what the AI writes from: your offers, your audience and your voice. Our AI Settings walkthrough sets it up for your own offers.

You’ll see the offer written into AI Settings, the sales page built from those settings, a $19 monthly price on the page’s checkout, a tag for everyone who buys, a follow-up email drafted with Write for me, five short text fields for the address, each one set to save to the contact’s address, and a thank-you page for after they check out. Next you’ll see a $0 test option behind a coupon code, added so the checkout can be tried without paying. To save time, the video then skips forward to the export: you’ll see the tag filter applied to a set of sample contacts that already carry the tag, the filtered group exported from the contact list as a CSV spreadsheet file, and a sample contact from the group opened to show a full street address. Back on the sales page, you’ll see a test purchase with the coupon, and then the new contact record carrying the address that came through the form.

Office Hours is a live group Q&A and hands-on help session every Thursday at 2pm ET. Bring your questions and whatever you’re working on, and join an upcoming session.

The whole setup is a decision you can make in one sitting: add the address fields to the form people already use, set each one to save to the contact, and tag the people you want to be able to mail. Nothing has to go in the mail today. From that day on, addresses come in with your signups, and three months later you have a list ready for whatever you decide to send.

You can start a $1 trial and have a signup form collecting addresses this afternoon, with the tag and the export ready the day you decide what to send. And if you want help deciding where the address question belongs in your signup flow, bring it to a live Office Hours call and we’ll work through it with you.