Well you know the saying is to “keep them happy”. Business is run mainly on loyalty and the aim is to keep business by showing clients you care.

Other businesses on the other hand are always trying to get that lucky break to open the door of opportunity for your business. How they do that again is often about skill and also about luck – being at the right place at the right time.

During the festive season, company’s use the spirit of Christmas to get customers aware of them as ” close partners”. Often the way a greeting card is created is judge on what the company sending them thinks of the client.

Now if the client gets plenty of cards, then they may not see the impact of the card as being that great unless it is from a friend who works at another firm. However on many occasions it is known that you are judged on what you send. Many firms do not appreciate how new technologies can really help them communicate their message during a classic time when people are in good spirits and will absorb your offers better.

Compare the fact that during most of the year, your invoices, bids and other forms of business communication are the only ones going out to the client, any message attached normally has little significance for “bonding” your alliance.

Therefore it becomes difficult to maintain a data on all sales so it is better to get a sales tracking system or something of the sort so that it can be looked up to measure the number of sales that have been made up till now.

So during Christmas firms send out there Christmas cards but make classic mistakes:

1) Send out a generic card to all customers – shows the client that you are one of many – not really personal.

2)Send out cards that have printed signatures – again shows that this is just a formality for you.

With Christmas being such a luctrative time to build a better synergy with your client, the importance of the message is clearly self evident. Get a good message out which looks more then just “plastic” and your client will appreciate the effort. So the question is how is that done?

You can work to individualize the cards with blank inserts, but if you are a firm with more then 50 clients, this could be time consuming. Another option is to pay a firm to do signatures for you so that your client thinks that you are different. With the changing times, the impact of a TV greeting could be much to a firm’s benefit, as nothing sells your firm better then a TV commercial! For this some firms turn to the ecard phenomenon which has increased in users dramatically over the last 4 years. However only an estimated 38% of people actually use the PC in the US!

Now if you could put your greeting on the TV, you would reach 95% of all society, that includes your clients. Well we know that many clients have a DVD player hooked to their TV, so could it not be that the best way of being ahead of the game is to use technology to increase the communication factor. After going to a trade convention, a colleague of mine spoke of a frim that did just that. There is a firm www.dvdportraits.com that allows businesses to actually create a dvd card which includes the company photo, personal messages per card at a price associated with half the price of a Hallmark card. Imagine that where you are no longer appealing to your customer via a text based message but a full blown TV extravaganza, with the main stars being your firm!

Tell me if that is not a sign of the times. With the Christmas card being a real “closer” for smart businesses, you should look into these technologies if you wish to use this “Jolly ol Time”, to be noticed by your customer and really be heard and appreciated above your competition !