You may be wondering what had prevented you from writing your content in these languages before.  The answer is that until now, Send Out Cards hasn’t supported accented characters such as é or ê.

This is a feature that I’ve wanted for quite a while so I’m very excited about this!  I send a lot of birthday and Christmas cards and have been unable to correctly spell Happy Birthday (Bonne fête) or Merry Christmas (Joyeux Noël) in cards to my French speaking contacts.

You’ll find a great variety of blank cards (many without words in English on the covers) in the Special Collections section of the card catalog. The programming department built in a soft keyboard supporting Latin character fonts (non-Asian fonts). To use the new keyboard, go to the card catalog and click on the card you want to use. When you open the card, the menu will show the soft keyboard, which you can use to insert special characters in your chosen language.

Send Out Cards has tutorials on all SOC subjects in English and Spanish.  (click on FAQ and then on Tutorials & Media).

A few of the standard fonts were replaced so that every font in the system would be fully functional with this new feature. Make sure you check out the new fonts: Amore, Cursive Pen, Paintbrush and Rascal!

If you aren’t already a Send Out Cards customer and would like to try this out then head over here to send a card on me.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.