Have you been looking for ways to connect with your customers without making a hard sale? There are ways to cultivate and maintain contact with customers and clients and one of those best ways is using greeting cards. It may sound almost too simple to be effective, but this is a classic way to do a little inexpensive marketing and help your clients and customers feel more connected to your business and you.
I’ve written before about how to use holidays as part of your business marketing efforts, but some individuals have had good results with general “thinking of you” greeting cards sent periodically to clients and customers. Of course, you need to maintain a database of your contacts with addresses (a good idea anyway) so that you will have each customer’s contact information at your fingertips.
You don’t have to have a reason to send a greeting card, and in fact, if you can send out a friendly hand-written note or personalized card once in a while with absolutely no mention of business, it can really help to build a connection. We’ve all probably received that constant borage of mail from our Realtor or mortgage lender and if we don’t automatically toss it in the recycling, we may feel a bit of annoyance at the constant stream of letters, cards, calendars and refrigerator magnets. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about taking the time to send a thoughtful handwritten note on a nice greeting card.
A lot of people don’t get many letters and cards in the mail anymore. With the advent of the internet and e-mail, correspondence seems to be a lost art. This means that your card will be noticed and that’s just good marketing and public relations. You can purchase greeting cards in bulk relatively inexpensively. I like to pick up boxes of “blank inside” collections whenever I can find nice, decent ones in clearance bins and shelves at my stationery or department stores. These come in quite handy for sending out the impromptu notes. I’ve noticed you can even get rather large collections on E-bay for a relatively low price. Stocking up makes it easy for you to write a few notes during down time and keep your clients and customers thinking about you and your business!