However, for business owners the whole subject is fraught with problems – go the e-card route and you could be accused of being impersonal and a cheapskate, go the traditional route and your green credentials are shot to pieces and the mailing eats into that credit crunch’ based Christmas festivities budget.
It certainly appears that the UK as a whole is moving online – a telltale sign being the drop in the number of cards bought in High Street shops over the past few years.
This drive appears to be spearheaded by the young – NOP last year found that 40 per cent of 16 to 35-year-olds are now happy to abandon traditional cards in favour of eCards, and Mintel found that 53 per cent thought cards just too expensive.
However, those figures need to be taken in context with Government research in 2005 that shows over half of young males and a third of girls have never written a physical letter.
Big brands too believe in digital festive greetings, Coca-Cola again this year are bombarding consumers with mobile Christmas cards to send onto friends and Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB) has delivered their staff a suite of online card templates to choose from into which they can add personal greetings and make a charitable donation on behalf of each client.
So what are the top tips if you decide to break with tradition and go virt-yule (forgive me!) with your greetings:
You need buy-in from all departments – people will only send out the company e-greeting if they think it benefits them, so make sure all internal stakeholders have a say. However, remember a committee can be a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly suffocated.
E-cards can be anything you want – but the one thing you don’t want them to be is dreadful. Treat them like any other project that requires design and apply a decent budget so the results look professional. Your card will be a showcase of your creativity and professionalism, so make sure it doesn’t look like a last minute thought…
Personalise where possible – e-cards can be viewed as impersonal, so use the huge scope for personalisation offered by electronic communication to the fullest.
Subject Line – you need to avoid ending up in the spam box so give some spam busting thought to your subject line and test to make sure that your e-card will actually get through to your typical client.
Interact – an online card should be a brand experience for the recipient, so maximise it in terms of impact and length of exposure. Extend the experience and drive them to a festive microsite and offer interactive functionality -an advent calendar for example.
Be funny…but don’t be quite funny’ – if it really works and your e-card turns into a viral, you really have hit the jackpot. But if you try to be funny and fail, disaster…and it might turn into a viral for the wrong reasons.
Be careful about taste – keep the Brand/Ross nightmare in mind and don’t whatever you do write your message and send it after a Christmas drink when your judgement might be slightly impaired.
Monitor – make sure, like any digital campaign, you analyse the results and collect anecdotal evidence that it worked, or in fact, failed.
Remember – still donate to charity
Oh and one last point – unless your staff are all supermodels and beaus, probably best not to go down the all staff picture’ route.
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