Relationship Marketing

How to Use SendOutCards
for Your Business

Watch the Relationship Marketing Video

Many of you want to use SendOutCards to follow-up with people in your business. Great Idea!!

In order to get the best results, there is a question you need to ask yourself before you send a single card.

Are you sending out to get or are you sending out to give?

Sending out to get means that you are looking to get something from the person you are sending too. This is where you send out promotional offers or gimmicks to generate more business. This is traditional marketing. It has been done for 100’s of years. The challenge today is that we have massive competition shooting for the same consumer and the consumer has access to detailed information on all of your competition. Have you ever heard of Google? Your consumer can Google your product or service and have 100’s of companies to choose from in just seconds.  Because of this, traditional marketing and follow-up tactics are less and less effective. They still have their place in the mix of your marketing campaigns but without genuine Relationship Marketing, chances are you will be left behind.

What is genuine Relationship Marketing? The answer is simple. You send a message to your customer because you genuinely appreciate their business. That is it. No offers, no promotions, no fancy logos or brochures, just a simple thank you because you want to say thank you.  Appreciation wins over self promotion every single time.

Sending out to give means that you are sending a message of appreciation for the sole purpose of giving appreciation. There are no immediate ulterior motives. You simply want to say thank you. Your customer, client, employee, vendor or associate needs to feel that appreciation from you. We all need to feel appreciated. If you feel genuine appreciation for these relationships, you can give that appreciation to them through SendOutCards.

So how can you use SendOutCards for your business?

There are 2 categories of cards to send out

1. Individual Cards
2. Campaign Cards

Individual Cards

The first individual card is the Unexpected Cards:

It all starts with sending unexpected cards and expected cards every day. Make it a habit to start your day sending an unexpected card to someone in your personal life or in your business. This is the most important step to getting the most out the the SendOutCards Relationship Marketing system. Genuine Appreciation is a personal thing. It has to resonate within you. It has to come from your heart. The habit of using SendOutCards to send an unexpected card every day will ignite the appreciation flame within. It will give you the inspiration needed to genuinely follow up with your business relationships. In the early stages, most of your cards will be unexpected cards. As you continue to send cards, many of your cards will become expected cards. An example: You send someone a birthday card for the first time, it’s an unexpected card. After that first birthday card it is now expected because you are known as someone who remembers birthdays and sends birthday cards. By the way, if you are known as this kind of person within your business relationships, you will never have to worry about generating new business. Your appreciated customers will send you a flood or referrals without you even asking for them.

The second individual card is the Thank You Cards.

Your customers deserve to be thanked for their business. Your prospects deserve to be thanked for their time. The more genuine and personal the thank you card, the better. We recommend that you avoid any self promotion in your thank you cards. No offers, no reference to the business transaction, just a simple thank you. If you use a logo or phone numbers, make them small and discrete. Remember, you are sending out to give. At this stage, you are giving a thank you because the receiver deserves it. These are cards that you send individually. One at a time with as much personal touch as you can give.  People love to see pictures of themselves. Use Picture Plus to add pictures of you and your customers on the front of or inside of your cards. They will love it. The more fun you have with these cards, the stronger your relationships will build with your customers.

The third individual card is the Birthday Cards.

 This could be a send out to give marketing campaign all on its own. You could call it “birthday marketing”. Many successful business people do this and the results our amazing. Simply remember the birthdays of your customers and their families. Send them a genuine thank you card without promoting your business. The SendOutCards system can remind you of your customers birthdays and you can respond by sending them a personalized birthday card.  Click here to see how to add a birthday to your customers contact information. This example will also show you how to use the note section for that contact so you can keep detailed information on the interests and history that you have with that person.

Birthday and contact details information.

Birthday cards can also be included in the Campaign Category mentioned below. This would be a more automated approach to getting your birthday cards out. This may be necessary if you are managing 100’s or 1000’s of birthdays.

The individual unexpected cards, thank you cards, and birthday cards to your business relationships are the strongest way to communicate genuine appreciation. This is Relationship Marketing at its best.

Campaign Cards

Campaign cards gets us into the automation side of what SendOutCards can do for your business relationships.

The first campaign card is the Contact Manager Campaign

SendOutCards allows you to send a card or groups of cards to multiple people with one simple click of the computer mouse. We call this Contact Manager Campaigns. This is where you can send a single card or multiple cards to groups of people. The best example is the holiday card. Everyone wants to send holiday cards to their customers. This is an expected card. As most of us know, this can be a labor intensive process and something that companies dread doing every year. With SendOutCards, you can send your holiday cards in just minutes. Not only can you do holiday cards, you can create group lists in your SendOutCards contact manager and send  campaigns to VIP lists, New Customer Lists, Old Customer Lists, basically any list you want. You know the segments of your contact manager, you create the group lists and send out personalized greeting cards to those groups. Keep in mind that a greeting card is 11 times more likely to be opened than any other piece of mail. Your customers will feel appreciation every time they get a greeting card from you. Not only can you send group lists out, you can choose names within that list, click on the name and personalize the message within that one card before the campaign goes out.

Let’s say that you sent a card out to 55 people in your VIP customer list. It just so happens that you went golfing with Sally Jones who is on that list. You can send the campaign, click into Sally Jones and edit her message to make reference to your golf outing and re-save that card to go out with the rest of the campaign.  Click here to view a webinar on how to set up Contact Manager Campaigns.

The second campaign card is the In-touch Campaign

The SendOutCards system will not only allow you to send a genuine thank you card, you can also send a multiple card campaign that initiates with the thank you card.  We call these In-touch Campaigns. This is where you are periodically sending a card to your customer or prospect to keep you fresh in their mind.  Again, we recommend that these cards stay personal and appreciative in nature. The less self promotion the better. The following link gives you examples of personalized In-touch Campaigns that have been used by business customers of sendoutcards. You will notice that birthday cards are used in some of the In-touch Campaign examples. Click here to see examples.