Promote your business offline - Part 2: Send cards

One of the standard things many businesses did a few years ago was to keep in touch with their customers and clients, especially their best customers, by sending them greeting cards and post cards on a regular basis.

(To make the sentences less complicated, I'm going to use the term "customer" to apply to both customers and clients in the remainder of this message.)

This practice has become much less common today, and I believe that business owners who keep in touch with their customers by sending greeting cards will stand out from the crowd.

Yes, it's much more expensive to send cards than it is to email someone, but a real card in the mailbox stands out and is generally welcomed, whereas the same message in email may not be so welcome.

A few years ago, electronic greeting cards became all the rage. We could send them using a service and the recipient would get an email with a link to see the card. I sent a lot of those cards, but stopped doing it two or three years ago.

There were several reasons for my decision. The main one, however, was the growing number of spam emails I was getting using these free email card services. If it was annoying me that much, then I certainly didn't want to annoy my customers!

The second reason I stopped was because a friend of mine introduced me to a service that would let me send a card with nearly the ease of sending an electronic greeting card, but which actually put a real card in an envelope and mailed it to the person I addressed it to.

Now, I know that you may be thinking that this sounds like it's expensive, but it really doesn't cost much more than sending one yourself, and even less when you consider that you don't have to go anywhere to pick out the card and then mail it. You can do it all from the comfort of your computer.

The thing that really sold me on this service, Send Out Cards, was that it also included a full contact manager as part of the deal. Currently I'm paying a bit less than $11.00 per month (which keeps me current for all the services and buys points that are used to send the cards). Now and then, when necessary, I buy postage in chunks of $20.

It costs a varying amount to send greeting cards in envelopes and post cards, and this applies to both the points and the postage applied to the items that are sent. Currently the cost is quite reasonable and is about a dollar to send a greeting card and half that to send a post card, and this includes both the points and postage. I'm not positive, but I believe the cost of points varies depending upon how many you purchase per month. Of course, these prices are subject to change.

The contact manager lets you create multiple categories and each person can be added to as many of those categories as you want. I have categories for family, friends, clients, prospects, and a couple for Christmas and Thanksgiving.

I don't send a lot of personal cards, but Send Out Cards has made it easier and, if I add birthdays and anniversaries for my contacts, I even get reminded that it is time to send them a card.

If you are using the service actively for marketing purposes, you can even set up campaigns where you can send one or more cards to a group of one or more people on a regular basis. Most people probably won't do that, but the feature is available for anyone who wants to make use of it.

The contact manager is not a fully-featured as others I've used, but it contains all the things I need for contacting my clients and friends.

Now, let's talk about the benefits to you if you use the Send Out Cards service to keep in contact with your prospects and customers.

They offer hundreds of different cards in many categories. Some that I use are for letting people know that I was happy to meet them, thanking them for their business, thanking them for referrals, reminding them of something, congratulating them on special achievements, and sending thank you cards at Thanksgiving.

(Of course, they offer all the usual greeting card categories for personal use, too.)

I have not been making full use of the service, but I'm using it more than I used to. One thing I will be doing is to gather the birthdays and anniversaries of my clients and send them a card on those special occasions. Depending upon your business, you may want to keep track of your customers' children and their birthdays, too.

I love this service, because it makes it much easier for me to do something I want to do that I may not do if I had to do it all manually.

Before I go any further, I want to let you know that I am not an agent nor representative for Send Out Cards and I don't get any commissions or other compensation if you sign up for their service. I'm only telling you about this because I find the service to be reliable, affordable, and convenient.

I have two friends who are representatives for the company and I'll give you their contact information at the bottom of this message.

There are a couple of things I don't like about the service, however.

In my opinion, they make the mistake of intermixing customers and representatives in a way that can be confusing to people who only want to be customers of the service.

People who want to earn money by promoting Send Out Cards can become representatives, and both of the people I'll tell you about can help you with that, if you happen to be interested.

People who are only interested in using the service as a customer may become confused when looking at some of the purchase options and messages on the site when you log in to your account.

If you have no interest in becoming a representative, it doesn't take long to recognize what you can ignore. That makes things quite a bit simpler.

The other thing I don't like is their new card editor, but that is much more a function of my Internet connection than it is of their service.

I live in an area of Cherokee County where DSL and other broadband services are not available. So, I connect on a dial-up connection to WebWorkz. Of course, I'd love a much faster connection, but I've been a happy customer with WebWorkz for a long time. (In fact, I'm one of the people who initially created Grove.Net, which later became WebWorkz.) So, I'm grateful to have a local connection to the Internet, since I used to pay over $200 per month in long-distance phone calls to use the Internet prior to the availability of Grove.net/WebWorkz.

Still, there is a huge difference in the speed of being able to do things when you have a slow dial-up connection as opposed to a broadband connection.

The new card editor that Send Out Cards switched over to recently has some nice new features that I like, but it is several times slower than the old editor was. Now, it can take me nearly an hour to find a new card, edit the message, and send the card. Much of that time, I'm just downloading from the system, so I am usually writing something in one window until I can continue the process in another one. So, I'm not wasting an hour, because I'm getting other things done that I would normally be doing anyway, but it can be an exercise in patience.

If you have broadband, and a growing number of you do, then you should not experience this frustrating wait.

So, those are the only two things I don't like about the service. I see no need to mix the business opportunity part of the service with the customer options. I don't like how slow the new card editor is if you connect via dial-up. Other than that, I'll give them a glowing recommendation and I expect to be a mostly-happy customer for a long time.

So how can you learn more about Send Out Cards.

As I said, I have two friends who are representatives and either of them will be happy to help you. You can even get a free trial of the service and send a couple of cards to see how easily it can be done. In this case, seeing it really is believing it.

In no particular order, I'm going to recommend Pat in Kansas City and Linda just east of Asheville. Geography really doesn't play much of a part in which of them you contact, because everything is done online. In fact, when I first met Linda, she was living up north and wanting very much to move back to North Carolina.

I like and trust both of these ladies and I am happy to recommend them to you.

Pat's information page is located at LoveTheseCards.info.

Linda's information page is located at MailCardsOnline.com.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to respond to this discussion. I know that there are other business owners in Murphy who are also using the Send Out Cards service.

All the best,

JD