How To Send Personalized Holiday Letters…With Little Effort
Posted on December 1, 2008 by LJ
Mondays are productivity days at SimpleProductivity blog.
Most every religion has some sort of festival of light at this time of year, and everyone seems to have a flurry of shopping, communicating, cooking and visiting going on.
Many of these things are driven by traditions, or expectations.
One of the biggest stressors in my life used to be holiday cards. Having a large extended family that I rarely see, and friends scattered across the world, holiday cards were sometimes the only time we would update each other all year. But sending out 100 hand-written notes is an impossible task for me, unless I start in August. At the same time, I truly dislike the impersonal sheets that come in the mail.
I have streamlined my holiday correspondence using a word processor and spreadsheet. I had thought to present it as a series of articles here on SimpleProductivityBlog, but the series would have stretched for weeks. The process is rather involved, so I put it together in an ebook: Creating Personalized Holiday Letters: Using Technology To Quickly Create And Automate Personalized Communication.
The book contains specific instructions on how to set up a merge document and data document, and customizing the information to produce personal letters. In addition, step-by-step instructions for Word/Excel 2003 are included.
I am offering the ebook for the low price of $1.99 (USD) for a limited time. You can purchase it via PayPal, by clicking either on the Ebook like at the top of the site, or in the sidebar on the right, or by clicking the link here.
Here is the introduction to the book:
Our busy lives are filled with communication. Day in and day out we are bombarded with emails, phone calls, instant messages and more.
Sometimes, communication can be lost between us and those that are most important to us. Busy schedules and geographic distance can lead us to be lax in sharing with friends and family members scattered across the country or globe.
Tradition holds that the holiday season is one in which we re-connect with family and friends. While sending out handwritten notes is wonderful, it can quickly become an overwhelming task if you are obliged to send out more than a few.
Many people have conquered this problem by creating one generic letter, copying it and stuffing it in envelopes. This can leave the recipient very aware of the impersonality of such a letter. After all, if you are a friend from university, do you really want to hear about Great-Aunt Martha’s gallbladder operation?
Harnessing technology can help us through this. Unlike the impersonal form letters many of us now receive at the holidays, we can create personalized holiday letters using software that most of us have available.
In addition, using technology to perform the task of creating personalized letters can often make the difference between sending news to our loved ones and skipping the task altogether.
What This Ebook Will Do For You
This ebook will show you, step by step, how to assemble the information you will need to create personalized holiday letters. It will then walk you through exact steps in creating a merged holiday letter and mailing labels.
Photo by Darwin Bell
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Comments (1)
[...] I mentioned Monday, I do a personalized mailing to the people who get letters. More details can be found in the ebook, [...]