How to Send New Years Notes

With the New Year on our doorstep I'm thinking back to many of my important contacts that I've fallen out of touch with simply because there was never a pressing reason to reach out.

So, I'm making the time now to reconnect with these people to hear what they’re up to and share my own updates  And, just in case you haven’t gotten around to sending out Christmas Cards (or emails), here’s the process I use to send holiday update emails for the New Year.

The Template 

As with any communication the goal is to maximize your signal to noise ratio.  Make it short and relevant.  I generally like to include a greeting, one cue about a common thread we talked about last time, and an update:

Hi [name]

It's been a while since we caught up! How has [their job/project/hobby] been? I just wanted to shoot you a quick note to wish you a Happy New Year! 

Cheers!
Cy

 While this can be done with mail merge and excel, I've started to use Contastic exclusively to automate this process:

1.     See who you’ve fallen out of touch with

Contastic scans your gmail to figure out who you haven't exchanged emails with recently.  Next to each of your contacts we'll show you how any days it's been since your last contact.  A good rule of thumb is to stay in touch every 30-90 days.

2. Prepare your NYE template

In the Contastic template builder you can write an email in your own voice while inserting dynamic content that will customize the email using your contact's LinkedIn information.  The goal here is to make a personal email with the least amount of redundant effort.

3. Send!

Once you hit 'email' we'll pre-fill a template with custom content tailored to your contact and send the whole package to gmail or your mail client of choice (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.).  You can edit and send it from there!  We bcc our mailbot (he's harmless we promise) on the messages so we can learn which content you liked best for you!

  

This is the perfect opportunity to revisit folks you’ve fallen far out of touch with (on Contastic this would be your 90+ bucket).   I’ve also had some friends combine Contastic with Boomerang to schedule their messages to go out on New Years Day.  I hope this helps you stay in touch in the new year!