subject: Boost Customer Loyalty: Print Greeting Cards by:Colleen Davis [print this page] Custom greeting cards are among one of the most widely read and produced types of printed marketing material. Year after year, thousands of businesses print greeting cards to expose their corporate message to clients, employees and customers alike. It has become a prime tool for corporate communications, promotions and even business marketing. Did you know however that print greeting cards can also be a sound business tactic in itself? While others focus on the ability of these cards to project a message, some people have used color greeting cards directly to boost customer loyalty. Basically these people have found a way to maintain a consumer base using greeting cards instead of just trying to find new customers. By booting customer loyalty through custom greeting cards, they have changed the nature of holiday cards from promotional ads to a separate business strategy.
Personalization: One of the ways to adapt your greeting card to attract consumer loyalty is through personalization. By giving custom greeting cards with personal and engaging messages to your customers, you can really give them an impression that you care. For example, you can greet them by name like, "hello Mrs. Abernathy! We would just like to greet you a happy birthday today!". By doing it this way, people will really pay attention to your message. This technique is loads better than "Hello dear customer". Also, you can try to compose a message that relates to their purchase. It can go like, " Hello Mr. Walters! We hope that the toaster you bought from us is doing well". Specific messages like this can really carry weight in your "customer loyalty" greeting card, since it doesn't sound like a random off the shelf kind of message. All in all, most will be surprised at the thought and effort that personalization entails to mass mailed greeting cards. This makes your greeting cards more special and more memorable. Hopefully, it will be memorable enough to merit loyalty.
Relationship Building: Besides personalization however, direct relationship building is what greeting cards are all about. By paying attention to your customers' lives you will give them the impression that you care for them. You can greet them in their birthdays, send congratulations on special achievements and of course enjoy the holidays with them. Maybe you can even cook up a loyalty card or something similar where you can give customers discounts and special offers. If you are good enough in building relationships with your customers, they might even care enough for your store and eventually become loyal customers. By then, you may already have a nice consumer base that is totally immune to your next door competition.
Local Integration: Also, full color greeting cards are all the more effective if you are a small business with a community consumer base. By developing a nice and supportive relationship with your community through greeting card sending, you can eventually be an integral part of it, instead of just being another shop. If you start to develop relationships with your local customers, people will consider it part of their community. People will "hang out" in your shop, meet up with friends, or may be just come up and chat with you for a few minutes. By integrating yourself in the community you make your shop a social place, with all the business opportunities that it will entail.
As you can see, greeting cards can become its own kind of business strategy for developing a local market and gaining loyalty from it. If you are smart, and of course genuine with your effort to gain customer loyalty, your color greeting cards will be your best tool to achieve it. Good Luck!
