According to this story in MarketingVox, OfficeMax and Intel are both launching ecard campaigns to drive extra traffic during the holidays. Although, subscription sites such as AmericanGreetings.com have built multi-million dollar businesses around paid ecards, chances are most subscription sites will use ecards as a traffic driver.
In the past, ad-supported sites such as ChristianityToday.com and Canadian portal Sympatico.ca have successfully used ecards for traffic driving. So, why shouldn’t membership and subscription sites try them as well?
eCards are fairly simple and cheap to create. First, you create a little art that your audience would find particularly humorous or resonant. Your art could be an image, a video, etc. It can be static — I once offered a B2B marketing cartoon as an ecard to B2B marketing people. Or it can be highly interactive — a short online videogame, or even a “create your own” ecard where you provide humorous elements. (Example of the latter – Sympatico let visitors upload their own photos and then type in scripts to make the images in the photos “talk” – I used it to send my brother a photo of his own dog mouthing off.)
If you’re very broad in topic, and I mean really uber-broad, then you might want to “go viral” where your ecard is so appealing that a zillion people use it, send it, visit your site. But in my experience, going viral is horribly unpredictable. It’s like picking an academy award winning movie from a giant pile of printed scripts. You never know until after you launch.
A better tactic is to come up with creative that is highly niche and targeted in nature. Something that would really only appeal to your primary audience — the people who already buy subscriptions and stick on your file for months and years on end. Those best-of customers. What would they find screamingly funny or deeply special?
Develop the art — do a few different ones they can chose from (I think 3 is enough) — and then post them on the public area of your site. Let your members and prospects know the cards are available, and sit back and enjoy. You may not get heaps of traffic, but chances are, it will be the right traffic. Best customers tend to know other people who would be best customers too.
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