People love sincere greeting cards.  Multiple surveys have shown that thoughtful business greeting cards are an effective way to establish a closer relationship with customers.

To ensure your greeting cards are a success, and to avoid accidentally doing something to make their impact backfire, here's how to effectively use business greeting cards:

Be Organized

Whether you have 100 customers or 1,000 customers, sending out a greeting card to every customer you have requires some effort on your part.  While the results are worth the effort you will invest, you will do yourself a big favor by being organized.  Throughout the year, keep an organized and updated list of the names and mailing addresses of your customers.  By keeping this list up to date and in order, when the time arrives to actually create and distribute your greeting cards, you won't have to desperately scramble to compile all of the information you need.

Be Formal

Since you are sending these cards to your customers, it's a good idea to keep them formal.  However, formal doesn't mean that they have to be generic or boring.  It's fine, and actually better, for your greeting cards to be memorable and have personality.  Just ensure that in the process of filling your greeting cards with personality, you don't include anything that might offend one or more of your customers.

Don't Try to Sell

Greeting cards are not the time to try to sell anything.  Instead, business greeting cards are all about establishing a closer relationship with your customers.  You wouldn't use a greeting card to sell something to a family member, so don't do it with your customers either!

Personalize

A little personalization goes a long way.  People are so used to receiving generic mailings that they will definitely notice if your greeting card is personalized.  While the level of personalization is up to you, even simply handwriting the recipient's name in each card and signing the bottom of the card will show that you took time to think about that person when you sent the card.

Address the Envelopes by Hand

This ties into the subject above, but it's important enough to be discussed on its own.  Especially around Christmas, people receive a lot of snail mail.  Because of this, they may start throwing away pieces of mail that look generic without opening them.  To ensure that your greeting card doesn't end up in the trashcan, make sure you address the envelopes by hand.  This obviously takes some extra time, but there's no point in mailing out greeting cards in the first place if they're simply going to be thrown away without ever being read.

Double Check

Before sending them out, be sure to double check anything you wrote on your greeting cards.  This is especially important in regards to addresses and names.  A wrong address will result in a failure for the greeting card to be delivered, while a wrong name will come off as an insult to the recipient.