Remember when you were a kid, and you’d get a postcard in the mail from a traveling aunt or a handwritten birthday card from your grandparents?
You’d see your name scrawled across the envelope and couldn’t help but jump for joy with excitement over personal mail. Well, although our visible excitement has dulled, the truth is, we all love receiving personalized letters in the mail.
In amongst the flyers and generic promos, custom thank you cards are just one of those items that you can’t help but hold onto. So why not use this excitement-producing technique for your business?
Follow along to discover the benefits of sending your customers, clients, and contacts custom business thank you notes and how to streamline your handwritten letter procedure.
Break Through the Digital Noise
The average open rate for emails from businesses is only about 15-25%. While that may sound positive, the reality is that 75% or more of your emails are just wasted effort. Of course, email marketing has its place, but perhaps going old school on your thank yous is a more effective method.
Let’s be honest, opening up your inbox to a slur of branded messages is exhausting. In fact, in many cases, your clients aren’t even looking at the subject line before cleaning out their promotions inbox.
However, when a handwritten thank you card arrives in their old-school mailbox, it’s far less likely to go unread. Once you’ve got your letter in the hands of the receiver, it’s nearly impossible to resist breaking open the envelope.
Stand Out
Ready to get a leg up on the competition? While your competitors invest in Facebook ads and massive marketing campaigns, you can sneak in under the radar and get to the ones that really matter.
While we aren’t suggesting you ditch your marketing strategy, it is essential to remember that return customers are the backbone of business success. Securing that loyal client with a meaningful and personalized business thank you card is a great way to really stand out above your competition.
Even if your competitors are sending old-fashioned mail to their customers, chances are they are mass-producing generic messages that just don’t give that personalized touch. Stay ahead with a custom signature and make sure they know you put in the effort.
Build Connections
Once a customer leaves your business, your only real chance to maintain a solid connection is to follow up. What better way to follow up in style than a custom small business card.
Send them out to thank your client for a referral, celebrate the anniversary of their subscription or service, or say thanks for the support after purchase. This little personal touch lets your customers know the real people behind the business who genuinely appreciate their support.
Once you’ve won their hearts over with your personal touch and reliability, they will be far more likely to think of you next time they have a problem you can solve. After all, you truly value their business.
Reminder of Business
Thank you notes aren’t just for paying clients. Perhaps you had a customer come in for a meeting and haven’t heard from them in a while. Custom cards for businesses are a great way to remind them without being annoying or naggy gently.
Send your handwritten letter to thank them for coming by and invite them to ask any questions they may have. Even if they don’t have any questions, your subtle reminder can prompt them to follow through on their original inquiry and get in touch with you again.
The same goes for customers who haven’t purchased in a while. Put together a custom letter to send out to any customers who haven’t made a purchase in x amount of days and prompt a renewal of loyalty. With automation and special offer features, you can revive any lead all over again!
Inexpensive Marketing Tool
Between paid digital advertising, social campaigns, billboards, and even radio ads, your marketing budget can hit its limit awful fast. Fortunately, sending handwritten thank you cards is a cost-effective way to maintain essential business connections.
Instead of paying through the nose for remarketing or targeting ads, use the information you already have to make a cost-effective impact. In fact, marketers are discovering that snail mail is making a serious comeback!
This is especially true for businesses that ship products as you already have your customer’s address ready to go!
Extension of Style and Brand
Every interaction with your brand helps your customers form an opinion of you. As a business owner, you aim for those interactions and impressions to be positive and lasting. This is exactly what your custom small business card delivers. When customers see you’ve taken the time to show that you care, they’ll associate this caring nature with your brand.
Thanks to confirmation bias, your customers will now have an even better experience next time they visit your business and be more likely to return.
In essence, if your brand and image rely around on putting your customers first, there’s no better way to send that message than a real-life thank you note example.
Personal Touch
As we mentioned above, personalization is likely something your competition just isn’t offering.
As you can imagine, sending hundreds of custom thank you cards to your customers isn’t always realistic. Depending on the occasion and your business size, you could be up all night, every night, working your way to a serious carpel tunnel syndrome.
This is why many businesses resort to typed, generic messages. The problem with this is that customers aren’t impressed by the generic and automatic sending of cards.
So how can you put together handwritten cards without sacrificing your hand in the process? You guessed it – Handwrytten to the rescue.
While robots write each letter, the entire message is printed with a real pen, making it look and feel like you’ve done all the writing yourself. Use realistic fonts and custom signatures to ensure no one will ever know you had some robotic help whipping up those 2000 thank you cards overnight; just make sure to have a tried-and-true closing to leave a good feeling in your customer.
Easy and Effective
We’ve already established how effective custom cards are, but what you may not know is how crazy simple they can really be.
Your thank-you notes don’t need to go on and on about every business interaction. In reality, just a short message penned with thought is often enough to make your clients feel unique and considered.
Top this simplicity off with the fact that you can write, customize, and send your custom business thank you cards from your phone, and you’ve got the marketing formula to master success.
When to Send Custom Thank You Cards
If you think this sounds great, but when on earth would I send a custom business thank you card? We’ve got you covered.
Here are a few prime examples of when to utilize this perfect personal touch.
After the First Visit
It’s never too early to follow up with a potential customer. Whether a potential customer has made a purchase or simply came in for a consultation, a thank you card is a great way to recapture attention and encourage their return.
Believe it or not, there’s actually psychology that suggests after receiving a ‘gift’ such as a card, humans feel obligated to return the gesture, often doing so in the form of a sale.
For Referrals
Has your loyal client sent a new customer your way? Referrals and recommendations from friends are now one of the most powerful tools for a business.
If your customer was kind enough to put their stamp of approval on your business, send them a thank you to express your gratitude.
After an Event
Whether it’s a trade show or a conference, if you’ve recently given a presentation or touched base with a multitude of people, make your follow-up stand out by customizing your thank you’s.
What better way to let potential customers know the quality of service you provide than a real-life example right there in their hands.
On Their Anniversary
While sending out birthday and anniversary cards would be a great touch, that’s not the business-related anniversary we had in mind.
If your business works with clients on an ongoing basis or uses subscription services, this is the perfect way to remind them how much you appreciate them. When their anniversary with your brand roles around, send them a note to remind them and thank them for being such loyal customers.
Just Because
Want to connect with your customers and business partners for no reason? Why not?
Not only does this spontaneous message come across as caring and thoughtful, but you may also even spark their memory to ask you a question or drop by for a visit!
Your Lasting Impression
Now that you know the benefits of sending custom thank you cards, it’s time to get ahead and take your business to the next level. From building more meaningful connections to following up on valuable leads, custom business thank you cards are the perfect solution.
Ready to get started with your own personalized cards? Get started with Handwrytten today to experience the easy and effective way to let your customers know how much they mean to you.
Did you know that 64% of households in New Zealand have a pet, and that the estimated 4.6 million pets outnumber their Kiwi owners? That is why it is no surprise that a preferred theme for New Zealanders’ personalised banking card is a picture of their pet.
Providing the best user experience is paramount to the success of financial institutions. This is why leading banks in New Zealand, such as our customer ANZ Bank, have started offering a web service that enables cardholders to upload a picture of their pet, then receive a personalised payment card using that pet picture as artwork.
While for New Zealanders ‘pets’ is the most popular theme, the concept of card artwork can be easily expanded to include a favourite football or rugby club, brands, or other affiliated visuals. Customers can select an existing image from a library offering multiple themes or upload a personal picture.
How does card personalisation work?
Beyond the cool look-and-feel of these cards, the technology behind this is fascinating. The ability for a customer to have a customised image on their card is a complex offering. It requires an integrated software application and post-production audit process to validate that the image falls under the specific ISO standards. One such tool is the Thales Gemalto AllAboutMe personal card design software that allows users to make their payment cards truly personal. Here’s how the customisation process works.
The first step of personalising debit/ credit cards is to validate the image that the customer has shared with their bank. This is required as customers will occasionally submit pictures that don’t fit the specifications and therefore cannot be printed on the body of the card.
Secondly, in order to create a great artwork on the card (just like the cat displayed above), the design process needs to adhere to ISO specifications. For example, the silicon chip frame position cannot be changed, while the payment scheme and the bank’s logos, as well as other features such as the name on the card, need to seamlessly co-habit with the artwork. Imagine if the head of the cat was hidden by the lead frame – this could look quite unpleasant! To ensure that all these specific requirements are met, an automatic zoom and shift algorithm must be applied to the cardholder’s uploaded picture in order to optimise the overall look-and-feel of the card.
Finally, as the service is available on the bank’s website, it needs to be attractive, secure and very easy to use. Users need to have clear guidance around how to upload the right pictures, including simple insights into the pick-and-place selection process.
Benefits of card personalisation
Customising payment cards can be a great traffic booster for online banking services. In addition, a personalised card is likely to become top of wallet for the cardholder, which means more transactions, and therefore higher revenue for the issuing banks and their partner payment schemes.
In fact, according to an independent report by Aite Group, financial institutions that provide card artwork for customers saw an average increase of 6% in card activation in 2018. Furthermore, the custom card product outperformed the generic card offering at an average increase of 21% in transactions, and showed an average increase of 18% in customer retention.
Card personalisation allows customers to identify with their card, which in turn creates loyalty. The popularity of the ‘pets’ card among New Zealanders means that the banking card is not just one of many smart cards in a user’s wallet, but has become a very personal object that can say a lot about someone. In fact, the bank card speaks for its owner. For example, the cardbody material is an adhesion message to the value carried, while the personal picture on the card has a unicity message about the cardholder.
The key driver for customising bank cards is the bond it creates between the cardholder, the card and the issuers. One thing for sure is that in 2021, the trend for people to pay more attention to their banking card and its look-and-feel is growing – and they have plenty of options to choose from, whether metal, bio-sources made, biometric or a card customised with a personal image.