Wish
You Were Here:
Online Marketing With E-Cards
Search for e-cards at any search engine and you'll find thousands
of sites offering free online greetings on just about any topic
you can think of. You'll find well-known companies like Blue
Mountain, Hallmark and even the BBC on those lists of search
results, as well as scores of entrepreneurs, artists and hobbyists.
What you won't find, though, are many museums or other cultural
organizations.
The visual arena of virtual postcards is perfectly suited
to museum participation, yet most are nowhere to be found. Search
for art cards or vintage cards, for example, and you'll be hard
pressed to find more than a few museums in the search results.
Look for flower or gardening e-cards and you'll have a tough
time finding a botanical garden that offers them. And online
greetings with animal, bird or marine life themes? Those are
offered by every commercial and hobbyist e-card site imaginable,
but where are all the zoos and aquaria?
Most telling, perhaps, are the search results for the phrase
"museum e-cards." Even in those long lists you won't
find more than a few dozen museums. And you'll only find that
many if you're willing to wade through 15 or 20 pages of results.
The popularity of e-cards
With the exception of New York's Museum
of Modern Art, Lower
East Side Tenement Museum, or Museum
of Automobile History ; Canada's Royal
Ontario Museum; California's San
Diego Zoo or Monterey
Bay Aquarium; and a few others, cultural institutions have
pretty much missed the e-card marketing boat.
That's unfortunate since Nielsen/Net Ratings recently reported
that 60 percent of all Internet users take advantage of free
online greeting offerings. Another recent study found that 81
percent of people receiving messages such as e-cards pass them
along to at least one other person; 49 percent to two or three
other people.
What does that mean for you? Adding e-card capabilities to
your website could be an excellent way to increase your traffic
and promote your organization and its programs -- if you do it
well. And best of all, e-cards are a feature you can add even
if you have a small website and an even smaller budget.
E-card marketing ideas
If you put your creativity into gear, the possibilities for marketing
with e-cards extend far beyond offering random images of objects
from your collections. The
National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia,
for example, ties its e-cards into an online exhibition of 61
American synagogue postcards. Visitors to the virtual exhibition
can choose to e-mail any of the historic cards to friends.
Transportation museums are one type of institution that could
very effectively borrow from this idea by setting up online exhibitions
of a themed series of historical photographs and ephemera and
making each one available as an e-card. I can already hear the
rail, trolley and antique car fans begging for the URLs.
How about using online greetings to promote your offline exhibitions
and special events? Or even your upcoming workshops and lecture
series? The simplest way to do this would be to include digital
images of your promotional posters in your online greeting choices.
And don't overlook the possibility of using holiday themes.
The San Diego Zoo, for example, offers a Mother's Day collection
of ZooCards. Who could resist? For history museums, an offering
of historic trade or postcards with Christmas, Easter or patriotic
themes would make for great e-card selections rotated by season.
The more unusual and maybe even humorous, the better.
Birthday greetings are another opportunity. Turn some of your
images into birthday cards by adding a border and clever tag
line. One of my favorites from the San Diego Zoo is a photo of
Hua Mei the panda with the caption, "Refuse to grow up!"
And don't forget Valentine's Day; It's the busiest day of the
year at online greetings sites.
Part II: How
to add e-card capabilities to your site>>
Part III: How to successfully promote
your e-cards>>
Copyright © 2001 Katherine Khalife All rights
reserved.
For reprint permission, please e-mail info@museummarketingtips.com
Katherine Khalife is a writer and consultant specializing in
museum marketing, customer service and heritage cultural tourism.
See the Services section
for information about her Internet marketing workshops and other
services.
