Benefits of Sending Corporate Holiday E-Cards to Your Clients

There are many benefits to sending business holiday e-cards over traditional print cards.

E-Cards Create a Memorable Experience and Drive Brand Awareness

Since e-cards are delivered electronically using the web, the realm of useful web technologies available to design them allow for the creation of experiences that are far richer than traditional print cards.

The usage of animations, photography, audio and other web technologies, combine to create rich end-user experiences that are engaging and entertaining.

Combining this memorable experience with the previously established notion of trust, clients benefit because their recipients will associate that great experience they had with the sender – your brand

E-Cards Create a Marketing Opportunity

More than just sending your warm wishes, the unique and trusting channel that e-cards create, provide an exceptional marketing opportunity for your business or organization. Leveraging this channel, you can then carry out a wide variety of marketing initiatives. For example:

Promote New Products or Services
Leveraging the increased consumer confidence created from the e-card experience, promote a new product or service offering to your Clients to help drive awareness and generate conversions.

Build a Marketing List
Build a marketing list by including an online form at the end of the e-card. The form could take names and email addresses to build a database of potential Clients or Supporters. You can then use this list continuously for direct marketing initiatives.

Collect Online Donations or Online Payments
As an example, Non-Profits can benefit by providing a link at the end of the e-card to their online form for accepting and processing donations. Pair this form with a viral marketing 'send-to-a-friend' tool and watch your donation rate increase exponentially.

Create a Viral Marketing Effect to Gain Exposure
Provide an online tool that allows your recipients to personalize and share the e-card with their family, friends or colleagues. This helps create an online viral marketing effect that typically leads to dramatic increases in exposure for your e-card and/or a product or service offering therein.

E-Cards are Environmentally Friendly

When it comes to print cards, it is estimated that the 2.65 billion cards sold each year in the United States could fill a football field 10 stories high. If everyone sent one card less, we’d save 50,000 cubic yards of paper.

Now imagine your company is sending out a card to each of your clients for the holidays, and further imagine each one of your clients is doing the same with their own clients. It's easy to see how much paper is being used for this. Sure, we can select cards printed on recycled paper which is great, but sending a holiday e-card essentially eliminates the need for paper usage and the potential for paper waste.

E-Cards are Efficient and Cost-Effective

Sending e-cards can save on costs and be more efficient than sending traditional print cards. For many business and organizations, sending a traditional print card to clients, buyers, donors, subscribers, etc is quite the process, not to mention the labor involved.

Often, the money and time clients will spend preparing and sending print cards speaks inefficiency. In most cases, clients like this can save money and a lot of time by opting to send a business holiday e-card. Plus, the recipient is provided with a richer experience and client’s can use web technologies with e-cards to satisfy a number of marketing initiatives they may have.

E-Cards Can Have Measurable Metrics

Since our corporate holiday e-cards are developed using Flash and HTML5, they are web-based. This means that clients can track statistics associated with their e-cards using analytics technologies to see the effectiveness of their campaign.

Additionally, when clients use email marketing software to send their e-mails with a link to their e-card (and possibly other links to products, services, etc) further statistical information becomes available to determine how many people read the e-mail, who viewed the e-card and how many they did.

The statistics and metrics available with e-cards provide clients with invaluable feedback regarding the effectiveness of their message and e-card. Obtaining these measurable metrics is something not easy with traditional print holiday cards.

E-Cards are great for Building B2B Relationships

Sending B2B holiday greetings is great for client and customer relationship building. In fact, more than just for sending warm wishes, you can use e-cards to drive many other business-to-business related marketing initiatives.

For example, B2B ecards are a great way to re-establish contact with clients or customers who you may have been out of contact with for a while. Putting your name in front of them once again can work wonders to awaken a dormant relationship. You can also use the opportunity to insert a link to your portfolio, or your company’s new products. As a side benefit, this gives you an opportunity to also update your e-mail marketing list.

There are many who would love to do nothing more than to send a holiday greeting to their clients and customers, but, unfortunately, just never find the time. When your Clients receive your e-card, it looks to them like you are organized and 'on-the-ball'.

The digital nature of e-cards also makes them an asset for business relationship building. With e-cards, you can also measure statistics about your Clients related to their interaction with your e-card. Integrating web analytics software is easy and provides you a way to further dig into what drives your business relationships. For example, imagine you provided an e-card insert to feature some specific information, product, service, etc, you can use the analytics to see who showed interest. Using these results you can start segmenting your list to further narrow them down into smaller pieces - niches.

E-Cards Establish Trust

When someone receives a traditional print card from someone they know, it can be assumed that the recipient trusts the sender. Whether it’s from their account manager, sales rep, manager, favorite website, family member or friend, for the majority of instances where one person sends an e-card to another person, this ‘trusting’ relationship is present.

With the common notion across the web, and by definition, an e-card is generally a digital version of a print card. They both have a personalized message, are sent to a recipient from a sender they know, and they mark an occasion of importance to the recipient or both the recipient and the sender. The only major difference is one is generally delivered by standard postal mail and the other electronically, via the web.

With these distinct similarities, it’s easy to assume that the trust a recipient has for a print card, would be similar to the trust the same recipient has for your business' holiday e-card.


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