When you send greeting cards one at a time for special occasions, to express your appreciation, to give notice to a recipient’s personal event or accomplishment or just to send a heartfelt message, those cards are likely the most powerful at building and strenghtening relationships. If you have a large clientele or customer, however, you obviously can’t spend all day every day designing and composing cards. So what’s the answer: campaign cards.
Campaign cards make use of several features of a strong card sending program (obviously I’m biased to SendOutCards because that’s what we use and we’re also SendOutCards distributors).
Campaign cards let you do the following:
• Use your contact management program or database for names and address so you don’t have to re-enter them.
• Use Groups or key field selection in the contact manager to filter and select the desired contacts for any compaign.
• Create meaningful text once, to be used for multiple cards (obviously this makes the card focus on your personal message, not on something personal about the recipient)
• Use the program’s merge feature so the first name(s) of the recipients are printed inside the card as well as on the envelope.
• Some programs (SendOutCards allows this) will let you add a more personal message for select individuals in a campaign mailing after you’ve set up the campaign.
• Campaigns can consist of one or more cards, with fixed or interval timing between the card sending dates.
When are campaigns useful? The applications go on and on, but you can effectively set up campaigns for:
• Holiday cards (and possibly accompanying gifts)
• Birthdays and anniversaries
• Seasonal cards
• Special announcements (don’t overdo this one) about your business.
The greatest savings in using campaign cards is time. By conserving your time but still sending personalized messages, you can make the most of greeting card relationship building and maintenance.
