The introduction of e-mail software that allows small businesses to create professionally looking e-mail messages without having any technical skills, has prompted many small businesses to consider using this tool to market their current customers and prospective customers. However, many entrepreneurs are finding that this boiler-plate marketing message is being ignored or “deleted” without ever being viewed. Business owners are finding that “personalized mailing the old fashion way is still key to winning customers.” [“Firms Hold Fast to Snail Mail Marketing,” The Wall Street Journal, January 12, 2010]
This scenario is the same for personal relationships too. It’s easy to delete or forget to read e-mails. Personalized “snail mail” is a more intimate form of keeping in touch with family and friends, as well as customers.
Pre-internet age I experienced the ultimate “snail-mail” effect when I began writing back and forth with my Pen Pal from Teen Magazine. Michelle was from Baltimore and I was from New York. After ten years of exchanging letters my Pen Pal and I finally met. We would see each other a couple times over the next twenty years and six years ago, Michele and her husband, Jack, purchased a condo on Clearwater Beach … twenty miles from my home.
We occasionally will correspond online, but Michele has little interest in looking at her home computer after she has worked on a computer all day. I don’t think we’re alone. Studies have shown that individuals still prefer to receive a real greeting card rather than an e-card for their birthday. The birthday, Holiday cards and newspaper clippings we send through the mail continue to remind of us our special bond. I save Michele’s letters (I still have her first letter) and she proudly displays the photo cards of my dogs!
We all have a strong need for human connection. That is one reason Facebook is so popular. “Snail mail” is still popular too. The same need for human connection is why we continue to send letters and cards the old fashioned way. And for many of us, it’s the preferred way to communicate with our family, friends and customers!
