Sending your customers a card at Christmas as a way of thanking them for their loyalty is a great gesture that shows your customers that you care and appreciate their business. Unfortunately, it’s also quite an expensive gesture, what with all that time spent designing a personalised card, printing enough out and then spending a fortune on mailing them out.

Thankfully, the advent of e-cards has offered a relatively inexpensive alternative to sending out physical Christmas cards to your customer base. If you already have an email marketing strategy in place, the chances are you are already making use of e-cards, but for those businesses who want to send their customers an electronic season’s greeting but don’t know where to start, here’s a quick guide.

The first step to sending out e-cards is to actually design your card. There are two options here; you can either design your card in-house or use one of the many e-card design services available online. There are advantages and disadvantages to both. Designing in-house obviously means that your card will be truly unique to your company, but unless you have a talented graphic design team (who are also capable of motion graphics) then this option isn’t really viable. Even if you do have a talented design team, designing e-cards can direct resources away from other more vital projects. If you take the in-house route, make sure you set a dedicated timeframe for the project!

Using an e-card design service can seem like an impersonal choice, but there are usually enough design options to make your card unique and thus make design services a valid option. You start by choosing a theme and a design and then personalise the e-card with your own text, photos and images. A great deal of these cards will allow for animation too! On the whole, this option is great if you aren’t confident in creating your own design. Be careful when choosing your e-card provider, however – there are plenty of good free designers out there, but it’s probably worth using pay services for a better quality of card. You’ll find that these designers don’t have to recoup their fees through adverts either, meaning your card is truly yours.

Once you’ve designed your card, there comes the question of distribution. Again, this boils down to whether you want to keep your e-card campaign in-house or source it out to online e-card services. The easiest route by far is making use of e-card services, who will usually offer you a distribution method along with your design. There are various packages available depending on how many subscribers you need to send your card to.

The benefits of sending in-house are obvious, but can also be problematic. You’ll need to send your e-card yourself, and emails with files such as e-cards attached are particularly vulnerable to spam filters. A work around for this is to host your card on your website and send subscribers a link to view it on the site – this is perfectly valid, but can sully the personal feel of an e-card somewhat.

Ben Greenwood is writing on behalf of Extravision, specialists in Corporate Christmas Cards

Ben Greenwood is writing on behalf of Extravision (http://www.extravision.com), specialists in Corporate Christmas Cards

Author Bio: Ben Greenwood is writing on behalf of Extravision, specialists in Corporate Christmas Cards

Category: Marketing
Keywords: christmas ecards, email marketing