Sending personalized greeting cards is a top strategic recommendation for staying connected to your customers. You can learn all about our reasons in this article. The executive summary is this: greeting cards elevate the customer relationship above a simple transaction of goods for money. It shows you know and become invested in each customer as a person. Plus, it provides numerous opportunities throughout the year to stay in touch.
That’s why your organization will want to send personalized greeting cards. Now, let’s look at how working with a partner such as Shutterfly Business Solutions will make sending personalized greeting cards a snap.
Automating your customer relationship building
It would be great if you could sit down and write a personalized greeting card for each customer. But you can’t. You have too many customers and other things to achieve. There are not enough hours in the work day — or year — to make that idea feasible.
That’s okay. You won’t need to spend hours or even minutes writing greeting cards anymore. You can send highly personalized greeting cards to each customer with no effort or time needed.
How? Automated workflows connected to your CRM and enterprise business system. Don’t worry; this type of integration is no big deal.
An automated, also called programmatic, greeting card program means cards are sent to specific customers when triggered by specific events such as dates, life events, or purchase activities.
The nuts and bolts of automatic greeting cards
A robust CRM is the heart of an automated greeting card program. It holds all the data a greeting card needs to create a personalized interaction with each customer. While important, the CRM isn’t the only link in the automated greeting card workflow.
Let’s look at the core components of an automated greeting card program. Please be aware that every greeting card workflow is unique. This example is merely one possibility to demonstrate what can be involved.
Workflow management
Shutterfly Business Solutions provides a web-based interface that allows you to oversee the entire greeting card program. It is where the parameters are set, and content and designs are selected.
CRM
A CRM contains all of the information about your customers. The greeting card workflow integrates with your CRM to trigger actions and extract data.
Additional databases
Along with the CRM, the greeting card workflow can integrate with other relevant databases, like current sales trends.
How a personalized greeting card works
The process of delivering personalized greeting cards to your customers is simple. It’s also invisible. Once set up, the workflow runs autonomously in the background. You and your team don’t need to do anything.
Here’s how it works. Like our nuts and bolts example of components, this scenario is to provide a quick explanation. Each program is unique and tailored to your organization’s needs.
Let’s say you want to send birthday cards to every customer.
Your greeting card workflow monitors the CRM each day to identify upcoming birthdays. A week before a birthday, it gathers all the names and addresses of customers who share that birth date.
Next, the greeting card workflow cross-references additional data in the CRM to add personalization. Maybe it’s to identify a recent purchase, a design preference, or some other detail that will make the message, design, or offer unique.
Third, the greeting card workflow will reference any supporting databases. You could reference hot-selling items that match each recipient’s persona/demographics/buying journey and include a discount code for it. You may be a chain of coffee shops, and the code is for a new blend or limited-edition drink.
Finally, with the date, content, and potential offer in place, all of the data is transmitted to Shutterfly Business Solutions for fulfillment using the massive Shutterfly platform.
We handle the card’s printing, proofing, and shipment to each customer. No matter how many cards you send, one or one million a day, each card will be personalized to the recipient. How personalized? Allow us to put it this way. If the information is in your system, we can work it into your greeting card content.
Let’s explore that idea.
Make greeting cards hyper-personalized
Finding a greeting card in the mail is always a welcome surprise. However, there’s a big perception difference between a generic card and a personalized card.
The more you know about your customers and add personal references to the card, the more important they feel. And that’s your goal: to deliver a VIP experience and make each customer feel seen, known, and valued.
Shutterfly Business Solution workflows for greeting cards can only draw upon the information in your CRM and other databases. It’s on you to learn about each customer and gather personal details.
Some great starting points include:
- Birthday
- Gender/Pronouns
- Hobbies/Interests
- Ethnicity/Faith/Culture
- Level of Education/Alma mater
Another interesting piece of information to collect is a profile pic. Shutterfly Business Solutions can also pull that image from your databases and add it to the card design. That’s what we mean by deep personalization. We can use all of your customer data and resources if you choose to do so.
What if you need to change the greeting card program?
A personalized greeting card workflow is fully automated. It runs until you click stop. Remember we discussed workflow management? That’s how you’d make changes, like halting the program. You can log in anytime, from anywhere, since it’s web-based, and adjust the program as needed.
Changes to the program could include but are not limited to:
- Adding a greeting card event (let’s celebrate Flag Day!)
- Stopping greeting card events (let’s not send cards on Flag Day anymore)
- Changing copy
- Changing designs
- Changing recipient criteria
Whatever you would want to change can be achieved. Almost all of those adjustments can be completed via a web-based interface. For complex changes, contact Shutterfly Business Solutions; we never stop being part of your greeting card program.
Send more greeting cards with Shutterfly Business Solutions
Automating a greeting card program can be a game-changer. It simplifies the process, improves the customer experience, and deepens customer relationships.
As powerful as it can be, an automated greeting card program is only one strategy. Shutterfly Business Solutions has thousands more that are ready to deploy. Using our expertise, scalability, nationwide presence, and massive Shutterfly platform will maximize your communications.
Let’s discuss how Shutterfly Business Solutions can improve your omnichannel communications in business gifting, direct mail, transactional mail, greeting cards, and books.
Capitalize on Shutterfly Business Solution resources and workflows to solve your communication challenges.
