Wish
You Were Here:
Marketing With E-Cards
How to Add E-Cards to Your Website
All that's required to enable visitors to send free online greetings
from your website is installing what's called a postcard script
on your server. The CGI
Resource Index lists over two dozen sources of free or low-cost
postcard scripts available for download, and if you're lucky
enough to have an on-staff webmaster or talented volunteer to
install one, you're all set. If that's not possible, you can
pay a programmer to install and set up a script for you, or purchase
e-card software from companies that provide installation as part
of the price.
Any website can offer e-cards, regardless
of budget
An option that may make even more sense, however, especially
if yours is a smaller institution, is to have your e-card service
remotely hosted. Remote hosting allows you to offer your own
images on an e-card page (or pages) on your website without having
to install any scripts on your server at all. The remote host
acts as the "engine" to power your greetings, and setting
up the card page is fairly easy.
The CGI
Resource Index offers links to more than a dozen remotely
hosted postcard options, some of which are entirely free. The
trade-off for free hosting is that the hosting company automatically
includes one or more ad banners somewhere on your e-card page.
If you can live with having an ad banner on your site and the
number of visitors using your card service doesn't exceed maximum
allowable traffic limits, free hosting can be a wonderful solution.
If the thought of ad banners turns you off, though, you can eliminate
them by using a paid version of remote hosting.
The highest-rated remote e-card hosting provider listed in
the CGI Resource Index is MyPostcards.com,
who provides remote hosting or e-card software to 40,000 websites
-- ranging from small one-person operations to Fortune 500 companies.
Their Free Basic service allows you to have one postcard page
on your site with eight of your own images for visitors to choose
from. You can change those images as often as you like to keep
senders coming back for more. MyPostcard.com's paid hosting option
costs $96 US per year. Called the Pro version, it's more robust
than the Free Basic service, allowing you to offer many more
images as well as additional features.
The Hummingbird
Society is one of the many sites using MyPostcard.com's Pro
service. Both the PuppenMuseum
in Villach, Austria and ClickImages.net,
an online community of artists, use Free Basic. If you look at
these sites, you'll see what the MyPostcard.com interface looks
like and how it can be incorporated into your own site design.
Rebecca Collins, the artist/designer who owns the ClickImages
site, uses the Pro service on her business website, ArtPaw.com.
"Traffic on both domains has tripled since we have been
offering e-cards," she says.
If you would prefer to run your online greetings from your
own server on software that includes all the latest bells and
whistles, MyPostcard.com offers an installed, ready-to-use Platinum
web application for under $600 US. It even allows visitors to
send a card to up to 25 people at a time, and makes it possible
for recipients to save, forward or print the greeting they receive.
To see how a couple of sites are using this software, visit AnimalCard.com or Its-Party-Time.com.
The latter puts a different twist on e-cards, using the software
to allow visitors to customize and send e-mail invitations and
announcements.
Helmut Morscher, CEO of Webby, Inc., the company that owns
MyPostcards.com, discourages website owners from buying more
e-card capability than they actually need. Small sites, he says,
can draw traffic just as effectively as larger ones. In fact,
when it comes to successful e-card marketing, Morscher insists
that keeping a postcard page fresh and timely is more important
in attracting loyal fans than offering a huge inventory of images.
Part III: How to
promote your e-cards>>
<<Part I: Ideas for marketing
with 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.
