Greet expectations

Reading Time:3 minutes

Published: 12:00am, 23 Dec 2011

It's the last shopping day before Christmas, and the clock is ticking. Luckily for the complacent, forgetful and downright slothful among us, we still have time to send a Christmas card. Sending an e-card means that you won't have to resort to the old trick of placing a strategic footprint (a strategic tyre track is probably over-egging the Christmas pudding a little) on the envelope to give the impression that the card you failed to send in time was just 'lost in the post'.

These days, thankfully, e-greetings don't carry the same sense of slapdash, errant lack of thought they once did. Before, receiving a generic one from a friend blitzing their e-mail contacts list - or worse, from faceless employers - was a mild irritant and quickly deleted. Now, e-cards have become a bit more nuanced with unforeseen spin-off benefits.

Aside from providing that momentary sense of smugness one gets from doing something green, they are often cheaper than traditional paper cards. One assumes e-cards are a godsend for overworked postal employees around the holiday period. For the more creative, they also allow anyone with a working knowledge of Photoshop to create the ultimate homemade card, doing away with hours cutting and gluing together coloured bits of paper.

E-greetings have come of age. Companies like JibJab and Rattlebox (which has the matter-of-fact company strap line 'free e-cards that don't suck') have taken personalisation to the next level, with funny videos encompassing all the great internet memes which may or may not involve your own head spliced onto a kitten singing Justin Bieber. PortableNorthpole has made Santa come alive, literally, with personalised videos of Santa spouting your message and inspiring equal parts wonder and fear.

There is now a multimillion-dollar business in e-greetings, with the larger companies offering the full gamut of services from libraries of thousands of stock cards to personalisation services that allow the customer to incorporate personal video or audio messages. The growth of the phenomenon is all the more remarkable given that the fledgling industry almost died on delivery during the dotcom crash at the beginning of the last decade. In those early, frontier days of the internet, when the mere mention of the word 'digital' in an initial public offering prospectus would get investors all hot and bothered, e-card maker Blue Mountain Arts was sold to Excite@Home in a deal worth US$780 million. In September 2001, barely two years after purchase, Excite@Home was forced to sell the loss-making Blue Mountain Arts to American Greetings Inc for a paltry US$35 million.

Despite the troubled start, e-greetings companies have found a winning formula of convenience, choice and personalisation and have managed to appeal to consumers beyond the traditional occasions of Christmas, Valentine's Day and birthdays. Today, dotcom bubble case study Blue Mountain is flourishing and offers a popular annual subscription service allowing customers to send as many e-cards and for whatever occasion as they like for a very reasonable set fee.