You return home from a job interview. Or from a lunch with someone you’ve recently met. Or from a business trip where you met some new people. Or from a meeting with your child’s teacher.
What’s your first action? Catch up with e-mail? Go through your mail?
How about send a card?
In these days marked by over-crowed in-boxes of electronic messages, a customized, handwritten card stands out like a Packer fan at Soldier Field. In typical Meredith Levinson fashion, her CIO.com article provides practical advice to not only send cards, but some great tips on how to write them.
Feel writing challenged? Check out her advice on an outline you can model after. Also, don’t miss the point about the danger of being too wordy.
For years I had great intentions on sending cards for thank you’s, birthday’s, nice to meet you’s, etc. But those intentions fell quickly to the side of the road as I plowed on to my next responsibility.
That is, until I ran into Send Out Cards. This service allows you to pick out a card online and type in your customized message. The cooler part: they print it all out on a real card, using your handwriting as the font. Then they stuff it, stamp it, and send it. In just a few minutes you have a card that is soon on its way (and the cost is roughly a dollar a card plus postage). I’ve sent many hundreds of cards since finding Send Out Cards years ago.
You can kick the tires yourself and send a free one. Click here to try it out.
Another idea is to just keep a pack of stamped thank you cards in your briefcase. Whatever strategy you use, here’s my advice: be known as a card sender. It’s a great way to express the appreciation you truly feel but too often goes unstated. And since business all comes down to relationships, it’s an easy way to have more frequent contact under favorable circumstances (one of the many lessons in my keynote entitled The Dirty Little Secret of Business).
Go ahead! Send that card! It’s a low-cost way to keep building your success, one relationship at a time.
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