Direct Mail Marketing: Holiday Cards

Many business owners ask themselves is it worth sending out a holiday card to their existing or potential customers.

The answer is most definately - YES, if you do it right, that is.

It requires alot of resources to get all the cards ready to be sent out. They need to be labelled for delivery, put in envelopes, they all have to be signed, plus the postage costs, etc. It might take a few hours to do all that work, and cost a few hundred dollars in postage. Or you can pay another company to do it for you, which costs even more.

Don't they just either get thrown out or put on a shelf and forgotten about?

Here are a few tips to make that will make all that effort of time and money woth while.

First off, we need to separate the card marketing strategies into cards being sent to individual customers, or if the clients consist mainly of other businesses, or B2B holiday cards. Ultimately, your holiday cards are just another form of direct mail marketing and should treated as such.

If your clients are individuals, such as past clients, these are the things you need to keep in mind:

Will they put a business holiday greeting card up on their mantle? Probably not - unless you make it a personal card. Hand write a thank you for their business plus the usual holiday greeting.

The point here is to make the experience memorable. Everyone gets tons of junk mail in the mailbox or preprinted material, you need to make it stand out somehow by saying they are important.

Don't try to sell anything with this card. That destroys the feeling and will leave a bad taste undermining your efforts.

The point is for them to remember you. Do this by being personal.

For business clients, the strategy is somewhat the opposite however. Unless you address the card to the right person, chances are your card will be intercepted by whoever sorts the mail and most probably your card will be displayed with all the other holiday cards on some shelf. Ho Hum. Nothing really will come of it.

So, for business clients who purchase from you, a sure way to get your card noticed is to include a well thought out coupon or rebate. This means that you give a $100.00 discount (or whatever amount that makes sense of course) on the next purchase of a product that they may not usually buy. This could be a more expensive upgrade that they haven't tried yet, or a new product that you are selling.

You need to spend an extra few dollars here to print a nicely decorated 'coupon' displaying your offer and include it within your normal holiday letter. Refer to it as a holiday gift, for all the business they gave you during the year.

This way, whoever opens the mail will see the standard holiday card, but instead of just putting it with all the others on the shelf, the extra holiday discount coupon will make it's way to the purchasing agent. Regardless of if it is used or not, your card will not go unnoticed because of the extra holiday coupon inside.

There you have it, a successful holiday greeting card direct mail marketing campaign takes a bit more work than just sending out preprinted cards. But if you are going to spend the time and postage, you need to distinguish your card from all of the others. And that is what marketing is about.