Interaction between business owners and customers, blog readers and prospects can truly make a difference. In cases like a membership site, it has direct impact how long your member stays. The longer they stay, the better for you if it is a recurring membership.

Photo by Pink Sherbet Photography

To create that personal touch, the easiest but perhaps most time consuming way is to personally greet each contact. Great when your community is small but not so awesome when it really starts to grow and you suddenly have hundreds if not thousands of people trying to reach out to you. Of course, you can hire people to help. That too has its own set of problems. Cost.

How do you protect your time and not be a snob in the eyes of your customers? One fantastic solution is Send Out Cards. This is a web-based tool where you can log in, choose a special greeting card or postcard, enter your personalized message and send. Much like email, except the recipient gets a real physical greeting card in their mail. Not a cheesy e-card, not yet another email that gets ignored or sent to their spam box.

That is the basic overview of the service. You can add many other options like cookies, brownies, books, magazines or gift card along with your greeting card. You can even use your own handwriting in the card. Their technology is smart enough to take your handwriting, digitize it and use it in your greeting card. These additional options do cost extra and that is to be expected. However, you can’t beat the convenience and personal touch they give.

The coolest part is the automation. Send Out Cards has a Campaignfeature. This lets you set up one or even a series of cards that are sent out to people you add to the campaign. These cards can be sequenced and set to mail at specific dates. A lot like an autoresponder for email. Let’s go back to the membership site example. You could create a campaign that looks like this.

• Welcome – thank them for joining the site/community, explain a few basic things or just say hi.
• Happy Birthday – if you collect customer birthday information and add it to the contact manager, members will receive a birthday card every year
• It’s Summer! – this goes out every June to wish them a great summer and say hello
• Thanksgiving – a card to wish them a good Thanksgiving and thank them for being a part of your membership site
• Happy New Year – wishing them a great year and look forward to working with them to reach their goals this year
• and so on

All of this goes out automatically. You might want to change up your card selection every year or tweak your message a little, but other than that it is rather hands free. As new customers or people come in, you could get an assistant to upload their addresses into Send Out Cards so they can be added to the campaign and start receiving these cards. It is very cool, low maintenance and definitely gets attention because it can cut through the clutter of email.

Some may argue that any kind of automation for communicating with customers is not sincere and ‘fake’. While that could be true, I think it is all in the intent. I think, if your intentions are wrong, you could be handwriting people notes everyday, eventually, it shows. Regardless, ultimately, I’d much rather have a marketer mail me something with a sincere note automated or not, than a marketer who does nothing, nor takes the extra effort and expense to reach out to me in a non-conventional way. After all, how is this any less sincere than a personal note loaded into your auto responder sequence?

Personally, I love these cards. Having received a few of them, the quality is great and it’s always so nice to get them. I keep them all – can’t say the same about email. And, people always remember who sends them real mail. Learn more about what Send Out Cards can do.