Celebrate Your Brand Narrative with Holiday Cards

A quick checklist to get started

One of the common visual storytelling tactics many brands use during the Nov-Dec timeframe is sending holiday greeting cards to clients, employees, partners, and vendors.

Pretty much anyone who interacts with your business.

Why do it?

True! It’s old style but a nicely designed card sure offers a rich canvas to strengthen your brand awareness, convey personal care, and drive customer retention.

After all, what we’ve achieved is always a direct product of our collaborations.

Therefore, acknowledging these connections is important both when these acts of kindness happen throughout the year, and during end-of-year holidays when we tend to be more reflective.

Need more convincing?

Externally:

Statistics show that increasing customer retention rates by 5 percent could lead to an increase in profits by up to 95 percent.

Source: Harvard Business School

Internally:

78 percent of employees say being recognized motivates them in their jobs.

Source: Gallup State of The American Workplace Report

Lay of the land

To get a general idea about the landscape, let’s take a look at the small business sector.

The Greeting Card Association published a 2022 white paper that nicely lays out how small businesses use greeting cards during the winter holiday season:

As you can see there is ample room to bring your creativity.

Here is a quick checklist to get started

First, the golden rule is simple; to make it work, do it because you truly mean it.

What’s your big idea?

Brainstorm with your team a single idea you want your card to focus on.

It could be a straight traditional holiday theme as the above SB stats suggest, celebrating a major achievement, employee solidarity, fully personalized to the recipient, and much more.

As you brainstorm ideas make sure your message aligns with your overarching brand narrative and identity.

It also helps to consider what you want your recipients to think and feel after receiving your card.

What’s your format?

Before you select your visual approach decide on the format of your greeting card.

Are you going with an eCard or a physical card? Each choice will offer different visual design, interactivity, and delivery opportunities.

What’s your visual approach?

Like any communication piece, you have a wide range of options.

To keep you focused use your brand guidelines as your “GPS” to guide you through the design phase.

Then marry them with visuals that celebrate the holidays and bring to life the big idea you nailed down earlier.

You can go the epic route by using an artsy illustration, photography & and illustration combo, interactive eCard, animated video, your whole team cheering in video capture, a friendly video greeting from the CEO, or even an interactive AR experience.

Also, think about what visual style you’re after; professional, minimalistic, modern, playful, vintage, and much more.

The copy could use your brand typeface, handwritten, or readymade from existing templates.

What tools?

True! The process I describe here takes more planning as you want to create a more unique card that aligns with your brand story.

Having said that, there are a ton of plug-and-play tools for both eCards and physical cards you can customize the base designs.

From design tools, you start from zero like classic Adobe tools where you’d likely need a visual artist, do-it-yourself online graphic design platforms like Canva - to a gazillion of other dedicated card creation online tools.

AI is the new kid on the block you can craft your season’s greetings with.

However, be prepared to sink loads of time in a rabbit hole process of repetitive refinements to get your desired design. Avoid asking for visuals and copy in one prompt, as copy tends to get distorted in the result.

Experience?

Some cards are single pages that capture all the above elements, while others open with a short heart-warming message and the second page offers space for a longer custom narrative.

The latter is true for both paper and interactive eCards.

As such a 2-page card offers you more of a story structure to pace your message.

Best timing?

Since a winter holiday card rides on the festive holiday spirit people are in, timing is everything.

The second week of December would be the ideal timeframe to send your cards.

Next? Track it!

With eCards, like anything digital, it’s quite easy to track opens and even clicks.

With physical cards you mail out, you can use Registered or Certified Mail to track receipts.

If you go fancy, some companies offer custom tracking solutions by adding unique identifiers or barcodes to each card.

Above all, a great signal is when your recipient acknowledges the nice gesture in a brief email or while catching up.

Curious to see my card?

To see the holiday card I created and my thought process behind it, click here.