Off-line Marketing Ideas

I knew that title will intrigue you, please feel free to comment.

These days we all rarely receive anything other than bills and junk mail in our mail boxes, so if you take the time to send a real greeting card to your clients, business partners and suppliers, you will stand out from the crowd.

Actually, it’s more like, you’ll be the only one there, no crowd :-)

I personally use an online service called SendOutCards, which gives me the flexibility of creating a single greeting card and then selecting a group of people to receive it. Groups such as: clients, suppliers, friends, family, etc.

SendOutCards prints, addresses, personalizes and sends real postcards, greeting cards, gifts, etc. through the postal system. This is not an e-card service.

SOC also allows me to enclose a gift with my greeting card, such as Starbucks or Tim Hortons gift cards, books, cookies, etc.

I also had them digitize my own handwriting and signatures into a font, so my cards look like they were handwritten. How cool is that!

The system is getting better and better. Now they also offer printing of calendars, posters, even business cards.

If you just built a new web site, or if you follow my advice — a business blog — you should announce it to everyone you know to attract them to visit. Although you can and should use opt-in email marketing systems to send an announcement to your contacts, I’d like to propose an “off-line” marketing strategy as well: postcards or greeting cards!

If your budget allows it, I recommend sending postcards to your existing clients asking them to promote your new blog to their contacts. To create personalized postcards, or greeting cards, I use my SendOutCards system which costs me $0.62 + postage for a postcard with a custom design ($0.31 for a stock card).

The design can be an advert for your new blog, and then on the flip side (or inside of a greeting card) you can ask the recipient to give a unique URL to their contacts, e.g. NewBlog.com/Joe, etc. where Joe is the real name of your client.

Using a unique URL will allow you to track new visitors/signups, and then award the one client who sends the most traffic to your new blog. You need to give your clients an incentive to promote your new blog, say a chance to win an iPod or something, or something more expensive, depending on your business model.

Follow this link if you’re interested in the SendOutCards business opportunity. This can become a lucrative second income or a full-blown career, all depends on you.