Mark Blevis

It’s greeting card season. Which means besides sending cards to clients, family and friends, we’ve all been receiving cards and emails with good wishes, brag rags and in some cases poorly masked pitches to purchase more products or services from companies we’ve already done business with.

While it may be too late for some, I thought I’d share some greeting card pointers and then tell you about one organization that knocked it out of the park with an electronic card.

1. Personalize it: I’m not talking about a mail merge that substitutes recipient names in a mass email effort, or making sure you pen your own signature on a real card. I’m talking about making each note personal for the real person to whom you’re sending the note. Make sure the recipient knows why you’re thinking of them at this time of year. It’s obvious to the recipient when the sender is just going through the motions.
2. Keep it short: You don’t need to write a novel in each card. A sentence or two will do. Something that says you know the person who’s receiving the card and that you’re thinking of them.
3. Make it sincere: People can sniff out motorized sentiment. If you can’t think of anything meaningful to say to the recipient of the card, perhaps you shouldn’t be sending a card to them at all. I suggest getting beyond thanking the recipient for the business, venturing into the experience of having worked with or learned from them.
4. It’s about the recipient, stupid (with apologies to James Carville): I’ve already received a number of greeting cards this year. A handful of them felt like sales pitches. One animated electronic card I received briefly showed a note that the entire company was sending me warmest holiday wishes and then reminded me where I could get their services by slowly animating five snow globes in sequence, each home to a major landmark from one of the five cities in which they have offices. By the way, I’ve never done business with any of the five offices. I happen to be a personal acquaintance of one of the partners. Make sure the recipient knows you’re thinking about them (see pointers in number 3).
5. Handwrite if possible: It may take a lot of time, particularly if you have a lot of cards to send. However, nothing brings together personalized, brief sentiment for the recipient than a handwritten note. And, most people will feel important knowing you probably had more cards to send than the one they received. It’s worth the effort.
6. Be remarkable (clichéd as it may be)

I wasn’t a fan of electronic cards until a few years ago when I received very creatively animated cards. One young family sent a fun animated card relating good wishes while celebrating that the mother of the young family had become a paramedic that year. If I recall, family was sending holiday wishes from the back of an animated ambulance, each member donning some form of medical treatment by the mother — a head wrapped in gauze, a leg in a splint…

Of course, it’s particularly hard to send personalized wishes and thank clients for business when the sending organization is ginormous and the client list is even larger: Google, for example. Because of an Adwords campaign we put together for one of our clients this year, the AdWords division sent us a link to a YouTube video which was customized for the campaign we ran. It featured three ridiculous scenarios in which Google engineers attempted to showcase the campaign’s title for all to see — mechanical bees forming the name in the sky, a domino machine that spelled the name in the parking lot of a mall, and eventually projected on the surface of the moon. The entertainment value and shock they could do this for all AdWords clients trumped a lot of the rules.

I recommend putting on some Vince Giraldi or Duke Ellington, pouring yourself a glass of wine, getting a comfortable pen and sitting at a desk for the evening to get your cards done.

Photo: Screenprinted Holiday Cards uploaded to Flickr by annamatic3000.