8 Tips for Great eCards

8 Tips to sending Great eCards to your customers, when doing email marketing.

1. Don’t skimp on the graphic design
What you save on printing and posting spend on a good graphic designer. Don’t send a home-made looking eCard. Our research shows that a quarter of people who receive an email card from a company think they send it that way because of cost saving – so whatever you do don’t make your eCards look cheap.

2. Customise it to your business
Do not use a generic off-the-shelf eCard design. Your logo must be included into the graphic design and not just ‘dropped’ into a space. And it must be specific to your industry, even have some information about your industry. 40% who receive an email card from a company think it is a branding exercise so make sure your branding exercise is a positive one.

3. Add an offer
Give something away, especially for birthday eCards. This could be a voucher, special ‘deal’, even a free report but it must be of value to your customer. Make it only available via the eCard so you can also measure its effectiveness, and making it exclusive to the eCard also makes your customer feel extra special. A juice franchise sends me a birthday eCard every year for a free smoothie, I’ve never redeemed it but it was a positive branding exercise.

4. Comply to Spam Laws
Make sure there’s a functioning unsubscribe that will also cancel all pre-set eCards as well as remove them from your email newsletter list. You can be fined if a subscriber removes themselves from your list but then later receives something from you, even if it is an eCard.

5. Use humour
Go on … take the ‘mickey’ out of yourself, or at least your industry. Even purchase a cartoon to use. There are some great sites by very reputable cartoonists that allow you to choose categories of comics. Make sure you change it every year – people don’t want the same cartoon two years in a row.

6. Track the forwards
Measure how many people forward your eCard to friends. Who knows? If you your eCard is worth forwarding to friends, you might initiate a successful viral campaign.

7. Less is more
Minimise the words. Make the picture the focus, just like you would with a traditional card. And don’t try to ‘sell’ on the eCard – it will be counterproductive.

8. “Hi John”
Use your customer’s name. From the Aussie Email Newsletter Survey 2007 we know that 35% of people like personalisation and only 7% don’t (the others don’t mind) so do not address it to “valued customer”!

It’s true sending your clients a greeting card is smart marketing to increase customer loyalty and sales just by showing them you care but here’s the thing … how many businesses actually get around to sending greeting cards. Even if you do it at Christmas, so are many other businesses so yours might get lost in the pile.

What if you sent a card to clients throughout the year for other occasions? Like their birthday. All this is fine if you have the system in place and/or the man power. So if sending birthdays cards is one of those things you are always going to get around to, then set it up to be done automatically via your newsletter subscriber list.

Sending birthday cards via email might sound a bit impersonal but at least you are doing it. In fact our research is showing that it doesn’t really matter how you do it, if you acknowledge a client’s birthday, they see you as caring.