Christmas Preparations

It doesn't seem that long ago when we were thinking of our summer holidays, buying summer clothes and suntan lotions, and now we are here with a couple of months to go before Christmas. Where do all the time go.

So how are your preparations going?

This year are you planning to buy gifts for your clients, colleagues or perhaps your suppliers?

Are you planning to send out Christmas cards?

Now is the time to sort these out, if you haven't started already.

Your first step is to decide on your Christmas card, what design will you go for, you can order these from your printers, they will have a selection of cards to choose from. They also will have a list of corporate gifts for you to consider. If you need help sourcing this info I can provide you with contacts.

You could print on the cards your logo and have a personal message inserted from you and your colleages or may be the standard message in cards would suffice and your logo printed.

Hopefully, by this time you will know how many cards you will need to order, if not then you will need to collate on a spreadsheet the contact names and addresses of those you want to send a card to. If there are more than one person in an organisation you wish to send a card to, don't forget to make allowance for this and also allow extra cards for whom you may have forgotten.

Once you have everything in place, your cards ordered, your corporate gifts sorted, and your list of contacts typed up onto your spreadsheet, then all that is needed are your cards printed.

This is a process I go through with my clients each year, we prepare in advance our list of names and addresses, checking the address, if anyone has moved office, left etc., spelling errors, inclusions or deletions from the list. This may take a couple of weeks to prepare with toing and froing with the information, but it saves time in the long run, as the list is kept for future years or mailouts.

Once we have the cards and envelopes I can then get on with preparing the address labels from the information merged from the prepared spreadsheet directly to the labels. You can do this via the Mailmerge function within Microsoft Word - will save you time rather than copying and pasting or even retyping/handwriting onto the labels.

If you need help with this then I have a seasonal offer to help with prepare your list http://bit.ly/1N9bkUc. Give me a call on 07918 667509 to discuss further.

Take Care

Kath