Are you planning on sending out holiday cards? Whether they are business or personal, your virtual assistant can help - especially if your contacts are in Outlook, Act!, Goldmine, Palm Desktop or other electronic format.

A virtual assistant can select and purchase the card for you and get the envelopes printed with your return and recipient address on it. All you need to do is sign it.

Decide which contacts to include.
It is easy to select contacts if you keep them in categories such as vendors, clients, prospects, business and personal.

Get a count of the number of business cards you will need.

Tip: Create a custom Yes/No field or new category in your contact manager called “holiday list” and put the contacts recieving cards on it so you can quickly select the contacts for next year’s holiday card list.

Purchase holiday cards.
Decide what type of card you want.

  • Should it say “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays?”
  • What kind of theme do you want? (cute, funny, no photo - just words, Norman Rockwell, etc.)
  • Do you want to send a postcard or one in an envelope?
  • What size card do you want? (larger sizes may cost more to send)

Have your VA purchase holiday cards for you.
If you plan to just sign the cards, have your VA ship them to you. After you sign them, you can then send them to your VA to stuff and mail.

Tip: Take a close look at the envelopes included with the holiday cards. If you are printing the return and recipient address right on the envelope, you will need an envelepe made of paper that absorbs ink fast.

Envelopes with a high gloss are usually not absorbent and the ink will smear. The cents extra it costs to purchase cards with good quality envelopes is well worth it because they are less labor intensive.

Decide how you want to group the contacts.
Will certain contacts be getting a different card or personal message?
Do some of the envelopes require different postage (i.e. different country)?

By deciding before you print the labels and envelopes, you can sort the contacts so these different contacts are grouped. This will save you time when writing cards and putting postage on.

Create a recipient file.
Exporting your contacts into a spreadsheet makes it easier to sort the contacts and, if a problem occurs during printing, restarting the printing process where you left off. Include the prefix, first name, last name, and country fields.

If you have no criteria, it is best to sort by last name and then first so that if you need to find a particular person, you can locate them quickly.

After creating the spreadsheet, sort the list by the criteria you setup before as well as by country. You may want to cut the spreadsheet into several files if you are using different cards.

Create or review the greetings field.
Usually, we don’t want to use the standard “Mr John Doe” greeting for holiday cards. We want them to say “Mr. John Doe and Family” or “Mr. and Mrs. John Doe.”

A greetings field is a great way to handle this. Start by deciding which general format you want to use. For “Mr. & Mrs. Doe” fill the greeting field with the phrase “Mr. & Mrs. ” and the recipient’s last name. For “Mr. John Doe and Family”, fill the greeting field with the recipient’s prefix, first name, last name and the phrase ” & Family”.

After you fill the field with the standard greeting, manually go through and change those that are the exception to the rule. Depending on what spreadsheet program you use, you may need remove the formula from the greeting field by copying the content and using “Paste Special” to save only the values.

Tip: Add a custom field to your contact manager to store your “greetings line” so you can reuse it for all your occasion cards.

Print return and recipient address on envelope.
It takes longer to print labels and manually put them on each envelope than it does to print the return and recipient address right on the envelope.

Since the contacts are in an electronic format, you can do a mail merge using a word processing program. The key to addressing the envelopes is to make sure your document reflects the actual size of the envelope.

Put postage on the envelopes.
By having grouped them by country, you should be able to quickly put stamps on the envelopes.

Sign cards, stuff the envelopes, and mail.