The Best Way to Spread B2B Holiday Cheer
I personally prefer the tactile and sentimental tradition of sending holiday cards, but with a B2B business, printed cards aren’t the way to go. Here are some practical and exciting reasons why your B2B company should send digital holiday greetings this season.
1. Accuracy
We almost exclusively communicate through digital channels today. Especially in the B2B world. So it’s likely that your email addresses are more accurate than physical addresses. Since you should use the channel with a greater success rate, send it to an email address instead of to the dead letter office or a landfill.
2. Speed
Not only is email faster when it’s successfully sent, but you’re notified of “failures” within seconds. There’s nothing more frustrating than receiving a “return to sender” holiday card a week after the holidays. With email, you can quickly fix the address typo, or you can do a little reconnaissance work to discover the current/correct email address.
3. Reach
If your client is a company of 500 employees, to whom do you address the letter? The CEO? The secretary of the CEO? The front desk? The person who pays the bills in accounting? The IT director? The best answer is, all of the above! The wonderful thing about email is that you can inexpensively send your holiday greeting to multiple contacts within a company.
Sending a physical holiday card work wells for B2C because they’re only trying to reach a particular person with each card. With B2B, it’s a different story: one physical holiday card will fail to spread holiday cheer to several individuals within a company.
It’s best to come up with a strategy to send holiday ecards to all the right people. For example, ask your managers to send you a list of all the individuals that they work with within a client company. Go over the raw data, make sure there are no duplicates or people left out, and send a list to every manager.
4. CTA
A Forbes article from a few years ago insightfully argues that an advantage of sending digital holiday greetings is a strong CTA. In many ways, physical cards can’t offer an interactive call to action. Digital cards, on the other hand, can offer a simple and effective CTA. For example:
- Linking to a general company “happy holidays” video posted on YouTube
- Sharing a seasonal blog post
- Sending them to a custom landing page
- Linking to a holiday video about your company’s holiday service project this year
Don’t let this communication go to waste. A digital holiday ecard is an opportunity for your clients to learn more about your company.
5. Customization
With ecards, it’s easy to customize. You can create different cards to send the appropriate holiday greeting: “Happy Holidays,” “Merry Christmas,” “Happy Yule,” “Happy New Year,” or “Happy Hanukkah.”
Whether your creative team designs your Christmas card or you use an online company, both venues make it easy to add a “handwritten” or individually typed message. Encourage your employees to write 2–3 personalized sentences. (It’s helpful to also give them a list of appropriate examples or offer a professional Mad Libs for their holiday cards.)
6. Creativity
Huzzah for multimodal creativity! With digital holiday cards, you can include movies, interactive cards, a playlist, an app, etc. A SalesForce blog, Adweek article, and Hubspot post provide some great examples illustrating the unlimited creativity of digital holiday greetings and gifts.
- AMP’s Holiday MixTape
- Campbell Ewald’s Peace Video
7. “Cool” Factor
It’s not like we’re sending cards to a bunch of librarians, scrapbookers, or medieval historians. Our audience is receptive and impressed with communications that are clever, innovative, and tech-savvy. So be cool and Millenial by using ecards.
8. Sustainability
Sending digital holiday greetings is better for the environment. If your company is striving for a greater business sustainability, this is a public way of showing your company’s commitment to the environment.
Quality Ecard Providers
There are some unattractive ecards sites targeting businesses, so I sifted through them to find some quality providers. Here are my recommendations:
- Ojolie ecards: Founded by a Danish artist, animator, and designer, Ojolie ecards provides beautiful animations that are interactive and charming.
- Paperless Post: So often company ecards can look drab, but these ecards are straight-up chic with collaborations with famous designers like Kelly Wearstler.
- GreenVelope: This company doesn’t offer interactive cards, but they do provide tasteful, charming, and traditional holiday illustrations with the capability to customize your company message.
There is a time and place for printed holiday cards, and the B2B marketplace is not one of them. Going with a digital card is the most effective way to get ahold of your clients, so try it out this season by utilizing the services of a great ecard company.