Please vote! One of my books is up for an award - Update 12/13/10

Wow, we're in 12th place! At the home stretch, voting ends Wednesday night. Every vote counts.

In the past year Marge and I have published six titles in our 31 Days Mastery series of business and personal development books. One of them, 31 Days to Greeting Card Marketing Mastery, is in the voting for the Small Business Trends Book Awards 2010.

I'm pretty excited about this but we got a late start, I just received notice December 8th that the book is in the running. I starting out behind 29 other books in the same category (Marketing) and 105 books that have been getting votes since December 1st.

Update: As of this morning, my book has 670 votes, enough to put it in 5th place in the Marketing category and 12th place overall. Turns out the place to be is in the top 10 overall in order to be able to get an award to display online and for bragging marketing rights.

I really appreciate your support and ask that if you would, please continue to vote each day through the 15th, which is the end of the voting and (coincidentally) my birthday! I fully expect many of the other books in the voting to have big surges of support during the last few days, so your vote(s) will totally count. Thanks again.

I would very much appreciate your vote. You can vote every day from now till 11:59PM December 15th (which coincidentally is my birthday). I'm sending email to friends and using social media to ask for votes but believe me your vote(s) will count. If you'd like to forward this to other folks I'd appreciate it. And when you vote, you can also hit the Tweet This! button and maybe that will help me get some more votes, too.

Thanks in advance for your support.

Of course part of the reason to participate in this voting is to sell books. If anyone is interested in buying 31 Days to Greeting Card Marketing Mastery, it's available in two places:

From Amazon.com at this link.

And from RBR Books in Leland, NC, a small, independent, totally awesome bookstore owned and operated by my friend Clif Bridgers and his wife Laura.

Greeting Card Marketing Tip #14 - Wedding Anniversaries

Here’s a way to really stand out with your clients: send them a wedding anniversary card. It might not always be appropriate, for all businesses or professions, but a great idea if your business has reason to work with both members of couple, for example, financial planners, decorators, travel agents, home or car repair businesses, insurance sales folks, and real estate brokers.

You needn’t make a big deal about a client or prospect’s wedding anniversary, a simple card will be enough. I suggest that you don’t get too funny, cute, or clever, but rather just send a card wishing them a happy anniversary and a closing. You can make it more personal if you’re close with the couple but otherwise just keep it simple – remember a wedding anniversary is a shared holiday and what one partner might find amusing the other might find offensive, so beware.

One big reason you don’t need to put too much into writing a message in an anniversary card for clients is because this is a time when the mere act of observance may be way more than anyone else does (possibly one or both of the couple, too). So just keep it simple, but do it.

You might ask, “Who sends anniversary cards?” And my answer is, “You do, if you want an easy way to get your clients’ attention.”

Greeting Card Marketing Tip #13 - Un-Birthday Cards

Okay, so you get the importance of sending birthday cards to your clients, prospects, referral sources and all that but you don’t have anyone’s actual birthday in your database. You’d love to get started but you feel stymied. Well, here’s a way to solve that problem so you can start right now, retrieve a lot of the birthdays of your existing contact database, give the card recipients a laugh and perhaps have them think you’re a pretty clever marketer.

Send an un-birthday card. Send cards to anyone in your contact list for whom you don’t have a birth date and say something like, “Well, I’d really like to send you a birthday card, but I don’t know when it is. So here’s the deal. If today really is your birthday, then woohoo, PAR-TEE! If your birthday was some time in the last six months, I’m sorry I missed it but I won’t miss it again if you send the month and day of your birthday – that way I can be sure to send a card next year. And, if your birthday is coming up in the next six months, well, you get an extra card – or you could just consider this one somewhat to really early. But please send me your birth day and month, too, so I can be more timely next year.”

Now, you probably don’t want to use those exact words, but you could if you’d like. The idea is to make it personal, make it perhaps a bit humorous and keep the focus on getting their birthday date.

And in the meantime, you’ve sent a card that touches on a personal matter, revealed some of your own personality to them, and overall made the point that you intend to continue valuing them and working on the relationship.

You could send these cards to everyone on your list at once, or divide list into twelve equal groups and send 1/12th of the cards each month, or send one a day. The point is you can start sending birthday cards even when you don’t know people’s birthdays.

Greeting Card Marketing Tip #12 - Birthday Greetings with a Big Extra!

Ordinarily I do not suggest stressing or even mentioning your business when you send a birthday card to a client or prospect, but there is a way you can combine a birthday greeting with a special mention of your business. That method is a strictly limited time offer that is linked to the recipient’s birthday.

If you run a restaurant or ice cream shop, I mentioned in the previous tip the idea of making the birthday card essentially a coupon that can be shown to receive free ice cream or a free appetizer. That approach is used fairly commonly and it certainly works, but this tip goes way beyond the coupon-level gift.

The strategy I’m suggesting is more appropriate for businesses with medium to large ticket items. The idea is to give the birthday card recipient a huge deal, one that goes far above typical coupon gifts that may be available from many outlets. For example, if you typically give 10% off coupons in ads or other promotions, using this once-a-year per person event I would suggest 30% or more off your pricing. If you’re a carpet company for example, where you’ll often include installation or pads for your cost or deeply discounted, with this strategy, you’d include either, or maybe both, for free – and not jack up the price of the carpet.

The goal of this type of campaign, which you might only run one every two or three years – and publicize it that way, too – is to cause genuine excitement over the very high value available in association with a birthday card from your business. If you do implement the program but want to limit the years it’s offered, combine it with your product and customer knowledge – for example, if you know that people replace carpet once every 6 years, then why not over the over-the-top dea on their birthday during the 5th year after purchase.

The concept of giving outrageous deals, even irregularly, combined with a birthday card can be powerful if implemented well, but you do have to balance the discount with business costs – in the end you should at least break even on any deal.

Greeting Card Marketing Tip #11 - Birthday Cards - A Must Do

If you do nothing else with greeting cards, send birthday days. I’ll go so far as to say you should consider sending a birthday card to everyone you meet but for some that will be impractical and the argument is much stronger to send birthday cards to select people and around your market niche.

Certainly you should send birthday cards to your best customers, to your hottest prospects, and to your most frequent referral sources. If you go that far, though, why not send birthday greetings to all your customers, all your prospects, and all of your referral sources.

There is no question that birthday cards are appreciated, even if you just send a standard card off the shelf. Of course, as with all contacts or “touches” in relationship marketing the more personal the content the more effective it will be, but birthday cards are suitable for everyone and even someone who doesn’t get it that birthday cards mean good marketing can catch on that this gesture is important.

You can read the literature, and the books, about the car sales people, insurance brokers, real estate agents and others who have risen to and stayed at the top of their fields, nationally, by establishing and consistently maintaining birthday card programs. This concept isn’t something only I espouse, or that card companies tout, the track records are clear for all to see that birthday cards can build and keep a business.

Stores, restaurants and retail shops often have birthday clubs and while one function is to offer something (a free ice cream cone, free appetizer or dinner, a special gift or service) when the card is presented during the recipient’s birth month, the greater win is the recognition by the customer that her or his birthday was noted and acknowledged.

When we implemented a birthday card program in one of our businesses and subsequently e-mailed a long list of past clients and contacts asking for their birthdays (we usually only ask for and get the month and day), we were elated by the massive positive response. A totally unexpected positive result was the number of people who thanked us even for asking and a few who wrote that they were looking forward to receiving cards from us.

So it’s pretty clear that if you don’t include sending birthday cards in your business marketing program you are missing a huge opportunity.

Greeting Card Marketing Tip #10 - Six Powerful Words

“It was nice to meet you.”

Clearly those six words aren’t very difficult to write. They’re also easy to understand. They don’t imply anything. They aren’t asking for anything. In spite of its simplicity, that short sentence can be one of your more powerful marketing statements – when you write it in a greeting card.

If you send a greeting card to someone within a day or two (at most) of meeting them and include just those six words plus the recipient’s name and your name, here’s what you’ve accomplished:

• You’ve acknowledged someone’s existence.
• You’ve made a positive statement about them, to them, without going overboard.
• You’ve demonstrated courtesy.
• You’ve demonstrated their professionalism by virtue of their providing you with their address.
• You’ve demonstrated your own professionalism by getting, keeping, and using their address to make contact.
• You’ve shown that you take positive action and don’t just float by meeting people.
• You’ve revealed that you may have a systematic method for contacting people and that you implement it – both gives positive impressions about your professionalism.
• While you’ve not commited to or asked anything, you’ve opened the door for more contact, whether it’s a response from the other person or more follow up on your part.
• You’ve also shown that even though you’re in business, you aren’t just about making sales, which can be a relief to others and allow them to feel better about continued contact, including the likely much more welcomed sales opportunity

Pretty cool, huh? You’ve done a lot with that simple card. If the card itself is personalized (like with their photo, or something personal (but still apppropriate) about you), then the effect can be even greater, but by sending a simple card you have laid good groundwork for building a new business relationship.

It’s interesting that the same exact words, “It was nice to meet you,” when spoke on leaving are almost social throw-aways and don’t really have much weight (though they are important enough that you shouldn’t neglect them). If you want to be in the top few percent who will actually follow up after meeting someone, and do it in a professional, none sales-y way, those same six words take on much more power.

Greeting Card Marketing Tip #9 - Portrait Is Better Than Landscape

If you only send standard greeting cards in your business marketing program, this tip won’t matter too much, because standard business greeting cards are typically thrown in a basket, taped or tacked to the wall, or thrown out. However, if you create custom greeting cards, especially with compelling photos of the recipient, or of you, or either’s business, there’s a better chance the person who gets the card may want to display it. And in that case, I strongly suggest you created portrait mode cards – they stand up better.

Horizontal cards are certainly attractive and if you use full bleed images odds are the cards will be in landscape mode. However, horizontally oriented cards don’t usually stand up very well.

Your goal is to either show up at a client’s home or office and see your card proudly displayed on a desk, counter, mantle, table or some other horizontal surface. Likely your client won’t put it there just so you can see it, but so others can see it, too – so here’s an easy, almost automatic way to help your clients and customers market and advertise for you.

So get used to either taking photos or cropping them so they’ll print on the front of a vertically oriented card. It’s a small technique, but we find it works quite well. In fact, we didn’t think of this, but discovered it when we visited clients and also when we tried to display cards in our own office.

Greeting Card Marketing Tip #8 - Keep It Short

When you send a greeting card to a business contact, don't write a lot. A short message is sufficient and if you write a long message you take a chance of diluting the impact of the card.

The way this works is actually sort of funny, but try this as a rule of thumb:

- Standard card: Medium length message, no more than two paragraphs.

- Custom card: Short message no more than two sentences.

The closer the photos and graphics are to the heart, the less you want the reader's head to get involved, so don't write much.

Greeting Card Marketing Tip #7 - Make It a Campaign

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.

Greeting Card Marketing Tip #6 - Send Cards to People You Know

Greeting cards are powerful but they’re also very personal. For that reason, for the most cost effective use of greeting cards in your marketing program and for the overall greatest effectiveness, it’s best to send cards only to people you know.

Confusing greeting card marketing with mass mailing misses the point and the power of greeting cards and can also be extremely expensive. Mass mailings are by definition sent to large numbers of people – the recipients may be grouped by address, interest, location or some other demographic, but mass mailings aren’t personal. Mass mailings can be effective but they’re really not about relationship building. Greeting cards are used in their highest purpose when sent to people with whom you already have a relationship.

If you don’t already buy into the concept of relationship marketing, if you’re not convinced that most of your business comes from existing clients, friends, family, people you meet or network with, and other referral sources, first off I’d suggest you check that very carefully, either by analyzing your own business or finding out what others in your field think. But if you truly don’t think relationships matter more than anything else in growing and maintaining your business, greeting cards likely won’t help. Imagine, for example, if the Department of Transportation in a state with toll roads decided to send personalized greeting cards to everyone who went through a toll – that would be silly. If you can count your clients (or potential clientele) in the 100’s or 1,000’s then greeting card marketing by sending cards to people you know can replace direct mailing and possibly some of your other advertising and marketing campaigns with a more time, cost, and results effective technique.

Don’t let a low number of existing clients be a stumbling block here. If you’re just starting out and have few (or no) clients, you can send cards to vendors, colleagues (yes, even competitors – you might be surprised how powerful that can be in getting business), strong prospects, and good referral sources.

The point is that when you send a card you send a powerful, personal message – it’s most effective when received by someone you already know.

Greeting Card Marketing Tip #5 - In Your Own Handwriting

Have you ever wondered why some print ads include a signature? Has it struck you odd that advertisers or business owners would want their signatures in such a public place? The simple answer is trust. When most people see someone’s handwritten signature on a document, they infer that the person who wrote it stands behind the document – the print equivalent of saying, “I give my word.”

Another trust-building technique in print ads is to include a straight-on face shot of the company spokesperson, preferably close enough that readers can see the whites of the spokesperson’s eyes. Looking someone in the eyes conveys trust. When a faceshot it combined with a signature the effect is multiplied.

Not all greeting cards lend themselves to including a good-sized headshot of the sender, and in fact that focus on the send can detract from the recipient focus that greeting cards for marketing should have. However, you should always make the effort to have your real signature included in the card. Company cards sent out with the company name printed at the bottom instead of a signature are overly formal and do not convey any sense of personal relationship with the recipient.

It’s also effective, though less important, to have the text of the greeting card printed using the sender’s handwriting. Actually, only very close friends and family are likely to recognize handwriting, compared to signatures, which are much more recognizable. Therefore it’s perfectly acceptable to use someone else’s handwriting for the card message if it looks somewhat similar to the senders. Of course if you’re hand writing the card then the same person should write and sign it, but if you’re using a computer generated handwriting font, choosing one that is fairly neutral without being obviously computer-created (meaning not too perfect), and is also legible is a good idea.

Using your handwriting in a greeting card increases the “human-ness” of the card. Using your own signature, whether hand signed or with a digital image of your signature, strengthens the relationship and can add the element of trust.

Greeting Card Marketing Tip #4 - Customize, Don't Standardize

Whether or not you use photos with your busines greeting cards, it’s highly desirable that you customize your cards. The greater the level of customization, the more personalized it becomes for both the sender and the recipient. If the purpose of sending a greeting card in the first place is to enhance a relationship, clearly a more personalized the card the better chance it has to fulfill its purpose.

Sending any card is better than no card, so if you’re in a rush of course it’s better to grab a card off the rack or from a standard collection than to ignore the chance to send a card. If you do use a totally standard card, look for one that conveys the desired emotion or expression and then add your own heartfelt words.

Very plain, formal corporate-style greeting cards do not convey emotion and are clearly company-focused. It’s doubtful corporate cards do much for building relationships other than expressing the most formal communications.

Sales and marketing departments of medium to large companies, even if required to use standardized, approved greeting cards, should press to adopt cards that, via graphics, photos, and/or printed messages, do the best possible job of addressing the target market’s needs and the company’s purpose. For example, if a business differentiates itself by depth of resources, or creativity, or environmental awareness, the most effective standardized cards to clients or prospects should do what they can to underscore those messages.
In addition to the greeting card’s content and design, special factors in the materials can also help a card to stand out. For example, using high qualilty paper, preferably from recycled materials that are so noted, is helpful. Another way to convey specialness is to use real, first class stamps instead of bulk mail or metered postage.

Anything you can do to customize your greeting cards that will help the recipient feel special will strengthen the relationship-building effectiveness of the cards.

Greeting Card Marketing Tip #3 - Picture This!

Words are okay, graphics and standard photos are better, and your own photos are best. When you take the effort to capture the image (you do always carry a digital camera, right?), transfer it to your computer, crop and maybe enhance it a bit, and then upload it so you can use it creatively and effectively in a greeting card, you send a clear message of care and importance to the recipient. Standard cards with stock photos aren’t very likely to be put on someone’s refrigerator door, no matter how clever, but even a relatively poor photo of someone’s child has a high door-ability potential.

What photos should you use in greeting cards? The last thing you should do is send cards with photos of your products or your business. The best are photos of your clients, your friends, their families, their pets, their homes, cars, boats, or whatever - the focus (oops, an inadvertant camera joke snuck in) should be on them. If you don’t have and can’t easily get digital images of your clients, the next best idea is to use personal photos of yourself, your pets, or even your children. The point here is that the card is being sent to a friend, so why wouldn’t you include personal photos.

Remember to use fairly high resolution photos in your cards so when they’re printed the images will be clear. It’s also a good idea to crop the original images to remove extraneous background content (why have a card front with 2/3 blue sky for example). Other simple photo editing to consider is red eye repair and being sure the photo is bright enough – even most rudimentary photo editing programs can easily fix either problem. You don’t need to be fancy with your photographs in cards, but the better quality the photo the better impression the card will make.

Photo cards are much more likely to be saved, to be mentioned and even to be shown to others – so make the most of your greeting card marketing by utilizing personal photos whenever you can.

Greeting Card Marketing Tip #2 - It's Not About You

Let’s assume you want your business marketing to be as effective as possible, right? If it’s not the case that your marketing must matter, if you’re happy with just any mention of your business or any contact with your markets, most of what I suggest won’t really matter. But if your goal is effective, meaningful, impactful marketing, than do whatever you can to make your market feel special, and appreciated. This is a guiding principle in greeting card marketing: It’s not about you, it’s about the card recipient.

How would you like to hear, or see when you visit, that your business marketing greeting cards are kept right on the kitchen counter, refrigerator door, desk, display case, or some other prominent place at the recipient’s home or place of business? If your cards are about you, it’s not likely to happen. If you have photos of the recipient, his or her family, home, pets, or business chances are pretty good (frankly we have it happen all the time) that your marketing piece will be in full display to visitors to the car recipient’s home or business.

The purest way to keep cards about your customers, clients, colleagues, referral sources or prospects is to not mention yourself or your business at all, other than signing your name, or maybe mentioning a shared social or fun experience. As soon as you mention your company name, the card becomes a sales piece, and that’s exactly what you do not want.

When we first started using greeting cards in our marketing I almost always included a scanned image of my business card on one of the inside panels. Now I only rarely include my business card image. The cards are special, to me, and I hope they’re special to the recipients as well. So I keep myself out of them as much as possible.

Greeting card marketing is to build relationships, not to sell and not to convey other messages about your business. The more consistently you are able to focus card content on the recipient and not on yourself and your business, the more effective the powerful marketing company will be for you.

Greeting Card Marketing Tip #1 - It's Personal, Not Business

Effective marketing speaks to the market. That principal is valid with all marketing but never more so than in greeting card marketing. Greeting cards are effective and powerful to the extent they are personal. Cards about your business, cards that event hint at sales or advertising lose most if not all their effectiveness.

If you are going to use greeting cards as a marketing tool, continuously look for ways to make the cards you send personal. On very rare occaisions cards can mention your business, but even then it should be related personally to the recipient – for example, thanking a customer for a major purchase or contract. The majority if not all of the cards you send to clients, customers, and prospects should be focused on relationship building – the relationship between people, not between a person and a business.

Don’t let yourself fall prey to a common mistake of using the power of greeting cards to send clever messages about your business. If the message is about you personally and your business, for example your excitement about a new office, thats’s fine, but the focus must be on the people involved.

As you use greeting cards as a relationship buiding tool in your business marketing you’ll gain experience and stories about how the cards made your customers feel and those experiences will guide you going forward.

As long as you don’t confuse greeting card marketing with advertising or even traditional public relations, you’re on the right track. Just remember, with greeting card marketing, keep it about the people, not about the business.