Send Out Cards in Inc. Magazine

The latest issue of Inc. Magazine has published their “top 500 fastest growing privately held companies”.  Send Out Cards is number 158 on that list.

Give us a call to try out the service and send some cards at no cost to you.

Cards to Australia

I see that the new Send Out Cards printing facility in Australia is now operational.  This is the first time that they’ve printed anywhere other than Salt Lake City, Utah so this is big news.  Having a print facility in Australia will make a huge difference to delivery times to that part of the world.

Sending thank-you’s

When you send a thank-you to one of your customers for doing business with you, do they display that thank-you on their desk or on the wall?  Are they so enthusiastic about the thank-you that they show it to everyone who comes into their office?

I get this reaction a lot to the thank-you’s I send.  I’ve lost track of the number of times someone has told me “I love the card you sent – I show it to everyone who comes in my office”.

So what makes these particularly memorable?  First of all, I send greeting cards in the mail for this.  An email thank-you will be forgotten almost immediately after it’s received but a card will be remembered.  Part of the reason is that greeting cards are fairly rare these days while we all get hundreds of emails.

The best greeting cards are the ones that have been personalized.  If I can put a picture of the recipient or someone they care about (spouse, kids, friend, co-worker) and put a funny caption on it, it’s almost guaranteed to be kept and displayed.

Lastly, for a thank-you card, they have to be sincere.  Nothing will send a card to the garbage faster than if the recipient thinks you aren’t being sincere in your thanks.  Fortunately, I never seem to run out of honest reasons to thank people for things they’ve done.

Want to try this for yourself?  Give me a call or send me an email and I’ll set you up with an account so you can try sending a couple of cards.  The results are amazing.

Greeting card ideas for realtors

When a realtor hosts an open house, they’d like to collect the contact information for the people who come to visit the open house.  Here’s what I would do in that situation.

I’d put a sign up near the entrance, welcoming people to the house and asking them to sign in.  The sign will state that at the end of the day, there will be a drawing for a $25 gift card and that everyone who signs in will be eligible.  The gift card will be mailed to the winner so please make sure your mailing address is correct.

To appeal to a wider range of people, I might even have some check boxes asking what gift card they might want since not everyone will be attracted to the same gift cards.  It could be Tim Hortons, Starbucks, Home Depot etc.

At the end of the day, I’d pick one of the names from that list and send them a greeting card thanking them for coming out and containing the appropriate gift card.  Everyone else on the list would also get a greeting card thanking them for coming out.

On the front of the card, I would put a picture of the house they had visited with myself in the picture.  This reminds them of both myself and the property they visited.

On the inside, I would provide my full contact information.

Now this may seem like any awful lot of work to create these greeting cards and to purchase gift cards and get everything mailed out but it doesn’t have to be.  I use Send Out Cards and this is what it would look like for me.

1. Enter the contact information into the Send Out Cards contact manager.  Maybe 10 minutes if you have a lot of names.
2. Take a picture of myself in front of the property – couple of minutes
3. Upload that picture and create a custom card – 1 minute
4. Send a card to the winner – 1 minute (adding the gift card is a matter of ticking off a checkbox)
5. Create a campaign for all the non-winning cards and send them out – 2 minutes

Each card costs about a dollar plus postage.  The winning card will also include the cost of the gift card which is its face value (ie $25) plus $2 for processing.

So if you have 10 people coming through the property, you’re looking at a cost under $50 (half of which is the prize itself) and time under half an hour.

And of course, now that those people are in your contact list, you can send them regular updates with no extra work.

Retail followup

Over on the Church of the Customer blog, Jackie Huba talks about a phenomenol retail experience.  Why it’s relevant here is that a greeting card was sent as a follow up to the in-store visit and that added to the overall experience.  In this case, the greeting card alone would not have been enough but it was an excellent finishing touch to an already exceptional experience.

Receiving a heartfelt card

While I send an enormous number of greeting cards, it’s rare that I actually receive one.  I got one last night and it made me feel great so I thought I’d mention it here.

I’m a leader with the local boy scouts where my son is a member.  Last night was our last meeting of the season and one of the boys handed me a greeting card thanking me for volunteering my time this year.  It wasn’t a fancy card but it didn’t need to be.  It was heartfelt and that made all the difference.

That’s what happens when you send a heartfelt card.  It makes the recipient feel great.

Why cards grab attention more than email

I’ve said before that sending a greeting card in the mail to someone will grab their attention in a way that email just can’t.  Let’s look at a couple of reasons for that.

1) Frequency

We all gets lots of emails every day.  In fact we get so many emails that it’s easy to lose important ones in the flood of unimportant or uninteresting ones.

Except at Christmas time, most people just don’t get greeting cards in the mail very often.  The vast majority of things that arrive in the mail are either bills or flyers so when something different arrives, it’s immediately interesting.

2) Kinesthetics

Greeting cards are a physical thing that can be touched and picked up.  Psychology tells us that that the more modalities we can hit with our message, the more effective it will be.  An email is purely visual while the card is both visual and kinesthetic (touch).

Because they are physical objects, cards are more likely to be put in a place where the recipient can see or touch them more frequently.  It’s rare that someone will go back and re-read an email over and over.  It’s even rarer that someone will print out an email and put it in a visible location.  It’s quite common, however, for someone to put a greeting card on their desk or up on the fridge or in some other visible place.

Comic example

After my last post on Comic Life, someone asked for an example of something I’ve done.

We took my son and one of his friends to a movie recently. At the theatre, we took a bunch of pictures of the boys acting out various movies in front of the respective posters. Then using Comic Life, I turned a bunch of these pictures into a comic with the boys saying things appropriate to each of the movies. We then uploaded this to Send Out Cards and sent out a card to the friend’s parents.

Really quick and easy to create a fun card this way.

Marketing cards

Following up on yesterdays post, people often ask what kinds of cards I personally send.  So here’s an example of a campaign of cards that I recently sent out to market a consulting company.

There’s a set of six cards which will be send out at the rate of once a month.  The cards will be sent to all my previous clients as well as to a number of potential clients.  Each card will have a quote on the front with a letter on the inside explaining the kind of consulting that the company does on the inside.

Although each card has a different quote and a different message, there is a constant image on the front that groups the cards together.  This image is a watermark of the company logo and it provides consistency from one card to the next.

How I send cards

When I send a card, I use a service called Send Out Cards.  I originally got interested in this service just to market my existing businesses and I was so impressed that I decided to become a distributor for them.

Why do I use Send Out Cards?

• It’s cheaper than buying a card from the store. I pay about a dollar a card plus postage and I’m hard pressed to find a decent card in the store for less than three dollars.
• It’s faster as I can do everything from my computer, wherever I happen to be.
• It’s less work – I don’t have to print the card, stuff the envelope, find a stamp or drop it in the mail. Send Out Cards does all that for me.
• The cards are written in my own handwriting, using my own signature which makes them really personal
• It’s really to make a custom card using my own photos or to include my own photos on the inside.  The vast majority of the cards I do are created from photos that I’ve taken.
• For those times that I don’t choose to make a custom card, they have a selection of over 12,000 stock cards – a much larger selection than I’d find at the store.

When do I send a personal greeting card? I send all my Christmas cards this way as well as birthday and anniversary cards. Send Out Cards tracks birthdays and anniversaries and reminds me when it’s time to send one of those.

Yesterday was mothers day.  Did I use Send Out Cards to send mothers day cards to my mother and to my wife?  Absolutely, I did.  Highly personalized cards with photos and written in my own handwriting.

When do I send business greeting cards? Following up after meeting people at networking events. Prospecting cards to attract new business.

The video clip here is from “America’s Best Product”, a show that profiles great companies.

Did I mention that you can also send gifts with the greeting cards? Things like chocolates or cookies or even books. I don’t send these nearly as often as I send cards but whenever I have, I’ve had a tremendous response from the recipient.

I have a weakness for the white chocolate cookies in particular – they’re absolutely delicious.

So that’s how I send cards.  How do you?