When I was growing up, my mother loved to show off the greeting cards that we received at Christmas time. She would tape them up on the border of the doorway between our kitchen and living room. By mid-December, the doorway would be completely surrounded by cards. What had been a regular-sized doorway became so narrow that you almost had to walk through it sideways to avoid disturbing the hanging cards.

Obviously, greeting cards are still popular today. People love sending and receiving them. As a businessperson, you should take advantage of that. Sending custom greeting cards to customers can be a wonderful way to boost sales and increase their loyalty to your business.

If you are going to send out greeting cards, there are a few things you will have to do. First, you have to have someone to send them to. You have to build up a mailing list of your customers. You can do this in a variety of ways. You can ask customers to fill out a "customer card" or survey. Or you can just try to get to know them, if you have a relatively small business.

Next, you have to choose the card to send. Greeting card printing services are not difficult to find, and you should invest in having good quality cards printed. Cards of less-than superior quality could give customers the impression that you are either cheap or that business is not good, both of which are things you want to avoid.

Unless you can print a custom greeting card for each individual customer, you will want to use a generic card. You don’t want to send a Christmas card to a Jewish family. So choose a basic "Season’s Greetings" card, or something of that nature.

Finally (and this is the most important part) you have to personalize each card. No matter how many cards you print, it is very important that you put a personal message on each one and sign it. Business greeting cards that are not personalized lose most, if not all, of their effectiveness with the customer. You want the recipients to know that you took the time to write out a message for them specifically. You will also want to write out each address by hand. Many people ignore envelopes with generic address stamps on them.

It is well worth your time as a businessperson to make custom greeting cards and send them to your customers. They will likely feel more comfortable coming to you the next time they need the product or service that you provide.