MARKETING
10 Best Ecard Makers to Show Your Customers You Care
According to HubSpot research, 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies that offer excellent customer service. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that companies often look for creative ways to continue delighting their audience.
A simple method to add a personal touch to your interaction with customers and leads is to use ecards. You can opt to send greetings to customers in marketing emails or install a widget that allows customers to send an ecard when buying a gift for someone else. Better still are companies that allow you to make an ecard online for free.
Below we’ll cover our favorite ecard makers on the market to handle your business needs.
Best Online Ecard Makers
Sending customers a card can be a great way to promote new products and show customers you appreciate your business. Here are a few of our favorite ecard makers out there.
Free Ecard Platforms
1. Open Me
Open Me makes it easy to send and personalize ecards. One of the best attributes of this platform is how collaborative it is, which is great if you’d like to send a card from your team to a client. With just one link, everyone can write their own note in real-time.
Why We Like Them
There’s no limit to the number of cards you can send for free.
2. EcardWidget for Shopify
Shopify store owners looking to send ecards to customers and allow customers to personalize gifts after checkout should use EcardWidget. This free widget enables businesses to add fully designed, branded ecards to their website. The free tier of this plan includes four card options, social media sharing, and 15 emails per month — a good start for small businesses looking to test this widget out.
Why We Like Them
EcardWidget offers an easy and free solution for business-to-customer and customer-to-customer ecard sending.
3. Adobe Creative Cloud Express
If you’d like to take a do-it-yourself approach to heard sending for your business, Adobe Creative Cloud Express is an excellent free option. Adobe has several templates available with the ability to customize fonts, colors, photos, and video. Premium plan users also have the option to auto-apply your brand logo, fonts, and colors.
Why We Like Them
Adobe’s Creative Cloud Express is a great free option for small businesses that allows them to create ecards and repurpose the content they’ve created for other marketing channels like social media.
4. Canva
Canva is another free option business owners have at their disposal. You can start with a template or create something new from scratch. Canva’s popularity stems from how easily and quickly users can create designs of their own, and creating a card using the platform is no different.
While they don’t offer an ecard sending service, you can create your own design and download it to use across other channels. Additionally, you can design physical cards with Canva if you’d like to use snail mail.
Why We Like Them
Not only can users create ecards using Canva, but they can also repurpose what they’ve created into several different formats to use across multiple channels.
Paid Ecard Platforms
5. Ecard Mint
Ecard Mint offers a full suite of business communication services to aid your marketing efforts. In addition to managing email campaigns, the company also designs bespoke ecards for holidays and other events tailored to your brand. Chose from a template or have Ecard Mint design something custom, including animation options. Additionally, their analytics reporting allows businesses to see results in real-time.
Why We Like Them
Ecard Mint is a one-stop shop for businesses looking to outsource email management in addition to providing customers with a wide variety of ecard greetings.
6. Smilebox
Smilebox allows customers to create animated ecards with a gift they’ve purchased from your online store. At checkout, customers are asked whether or not the item is a gift. If they check “yes,” they’ll be prompted to create a personalized card and schedule a time to send it. A bonus feature of Smilebox is that this ecard can be sent by text, in addition to email.
Why We Like Them
Smilebox allows gift recipients to track their package in addition to receiving the ecard. Additionally, the service allows companies to retarget gift recipients for marketing efforts.
7. Paperless Post
Paperless Post offers premium ecards on their site to choose from, depending on how much customization you need. You can upload your own images if you wish, and schedule cards to go out on a future date.
Why We Like Them
Paperless Post also has an option for users to send ecards via text message and social media for added flexibility and potential retargeting efforts.
8. Ojolie
Ojolie allows businesses to send ecards to clients and customers in a few simple steps. You can customize the templates they offer by adding your logo and changing existing colors to match your corporate ones for a fee. Once you’ve created a card you love, Ojolie will send you an email template to send the card, plus a social media link if you choose to send it that way.
Why We Like Them
Ojolie makes it easy for businesses to send cards without sharing their mailing list and none of their branding appears on the card or the site it’s hosted on. Additionally, you can host the card page on your own site if you prefer.
9. Corp Note
Similar to Ecard Mint, Corp Note is an all-in-one platform that allows users to not only send ecards but manage email campaigns, send event invites, and customer surveys. You can also use Corp Note for internal communication to employees.
Why We Like Them
Corp Note allows you to track when your email is opened in real-time, showing you how many times it has been opened so you can measure engagement.
10. B2B Ecards
B2B Ecards allows businesses to send animated cards to clients, customers, and employees. While they have a variety of stock animation options to choose from, users do have the opportunity to customize their cards with their own images, colors, and branding for an extra fee.
Once you’ve created your design and placed an order, B2B Ecards will send you a template that you can either forward to recipients individually or use an existing mailing list.
Why We Like Them
For businesses that would prefer to have an outside partner handle all of their email marketing needs, B2B Ecards is a solid option. If you chose to use their delivery service, they’ll contact you prior to the mailing date for a test run.
Boost Customer Satisfaction With Ecards
Ecards are not the solution to poor customer service. However, sending personalized messages like these will only enhance a customer experience already bubbling with value, help, and delight.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in November 2013 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
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MARKETING
YouTube Ad Specs, Sizes, and Examples [2024 Update]
Introduction
With billions of users each month, YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and top website for video content. This makes it a great place for advertising. To succeed, advertisers need to follow the correct YouTube ad specifications. These rules help your ad reach more viewers, increasing the chance of gaining new customers and boosting brand awareness.
Types of YouTube Ads
Video Ads
- Description: These play before, during, or after a YouTube video on computers or mobile devices.
- Types:
- In-stream ads: Can be skippable or non-skippable.
- Bumper ads: Non-skippable, short ads that play before, during, or after a video.
Display Ads
- Description: These appear in different spots on YouTube and usually use text or static images.
- Note: YouTube does not support display image ads directly on its app, but these can be targeted to YouTube.com through Google Display Network (GDN).
Companion Banners
- Description: Appears to the right of the YouTube player on desktop.
- Requirement: Must be purchased alongside In-stream ads, Bumper ads, or In-feed ads.
In-feed Ads
- Description: Resemble videos with images, headlines, and text. They link to a public or unlisted YouTube video.
Outstream Ads
- Description: Mobile-only video ads that play outside of YouTube, on websites and apps within the Google video partner network.
Masthead Ads
- Description: Premium, high-visibility banner ads displayed at the top of the YouTube homepage for both desktop and mobile users.
YouTube Ad Specs by Type
Skippable In-stream Video Ads
- Placement: Before, during, or after a YouTube video.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Vertical: 9:16
- Square: 1:1
- Length:
- Awareness: 15-20 seconds
- Consideration: 2-3 minutes
- Action: 15-20 seconds
Non-skippable In-stream Video Ads
- Description: Must be watched completely before the main video.
- Length: 15 seconds (or 20 seconds in certain markets).
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Vertical: 9:16
- Square: 1:1
Bumper Ads
- Length: Maximum 6 seconds.
- File Format: MP4, Quicktime, AVI, ASF, Windows Media, or MPEG.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 640 x 360px
- Vertical: 480 x 360px
In-feed Ads
- Description: Show alongside YouTube content, like search results or the Home feed.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Square: 1:1
- Length:
- Awareness: 15-20 seconds
- Consideration: 2-3 minutes
- Headline/Description:
- Headline: Up to 2 lines, 40 characters per line
- Description: Up to 2 lines, 35 characters per line
Display Ads
- Description: Static images or animated media that appear on YouTube next to video suggestions, in search results, or on the homepage.
- Image Size: 300×60 pixels.
- File Type: GIF, JPG, PNG.
- File Size: Max 150KB.
- Max Animation Length: 30 seconds.
Outstream Ads
- Description: Mobile-only video ads that appear on websites and apps within the Google video partner network, not on YouTube itself.
- Logo Specs:
- Square: 1:1 (200 x 200px).
- File Type: JPG, GIF, PNG.
- Max Size: 200KB.
Masthead Ads
- Description: High-visibility ads at the top of the YouTube homepage.
- Resolution: 1920 x 1080 or higher.
- File Type: JPG or PNG (without transparency).
Conclusion
YouTube offers a variety of ad formats to reach audiences effectively in 2024. Whether you want to build brand awareness, drive conversions, or target specific demographics, YouTube provides a dynamic platform for your advertising needs. Always follow Google’s advertising policies and the technical ad specs to ensure your ads perform their best. Ready to start using YouTube ads? Contact us today to get started!
MARKETING
Why We Are Always ‘Clicking to Buy’, According to Psychologists
Amazon pillows.
MARKETING
A deeper dive into data, personalization and Copilots
Salesforce launched a collection of new, generative AI-related products at Connections in Chicago this week. They included new Einstein Copilots for marketers and merchants and Einstein Personalization.
To better understand, not only the potential impact of the new products, but the evolving Salesforce architecture, we sat down with Bobby Jania, CMO, Marketing Cloud.
Dig deeper: Salesforce piles on the Einstein Copilots
Salesforce’s evolving architecture
It’s hard to deny that Salesforce likes coming up with new names for platforms and products (what happened to Customer 360?) and this can sometimes make the observer wonder if something is brand new, or old but with a brand new name. In particular, what exactly is Einstein 1 and how is it related to Salesforce Data Cloud?
“Data Cloud is built on the Einstein 1 platform,” Jania explained. “The Einstein 1 platform is our entire Salesforce platform and that includes products like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud — that it includes the original idea of Salesforce not just being in the cloud, but being multi-tenancy.”
Data Cloud — not an acquisition, of course — was built natively on that platform. It was the first product built on Hyperforce, Salesforce’s new cloud infrastructure architecture. “Since Data Cloud was on what we now call the Einstein 1 platform from Day One, it has always natively connected to, and been able to read anything in Sales Cloud, Service Cloud [and so on]. On top of that, we can now bring in, not only structured but unstructured data.”
That’s a significant progression from the position, several years ago, when Salesforce had stitched together a platform around various acquisitions (ExactTarget, for example) that didn’t necessarily talk to each other.
“At times, what we would do is have a kind of behind-the-scenes flow where data from one product could be moved into another product,” said Jania, “but in many of those cases the data would then be in both, whereas now the data is in Data Cloud. Tableau will run natively off Data Cloud; Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud — they’re all going to the same operational customer profile.” They’re not copying the data from Data Cloud, Jania confirmed.
Another thing to know is tit’s possible for Salesforce customers to import their own datasets into Data Cloud. “We wanted to create a federated data model,” said Jania. “If you’re using Snowflake, for example, we more or less virtually sit on your data lake. The value we add is that we will look at all your data and help you form these operational customer profiles.”
Let’s learn more about Einstein Copilot
“Copilot means that I have an assistant with me in the tool where I need to be working that contextually knows what I am trying to do and helps me at every step of the process,” Jania said.
For marketers, this might begin with a campaign brief developed with Copilot’s assistance, the identification of an audience based on the brief, and then the development of email or other content. “What’s really cool is the idea of Einstein Studio where our customers will create actions [for Copilot] that we hadn’t even thought about.”
Here’s a key insight (back to nomenclature). We reported on Copilot for markets, Copilot for merchants, Copilot for shoppers. It turns out, however, that there is just one Copilot, Einstein Copilot, and these are use cases. “There’s just one Copilot, we just add these for a little clarity; we’re going to talk about marketing use cases, about shoppers’ use cases. These are actions for the marketing use cases we built out of the box; you can build your own.”
It’s surely going to take a little time for marketers to learn to work easily with Copilot. “There’s always time for adoption,” Jania agreed. “What is directly connected with this is, this is my ninth Connections and this one has the most hands-on training that I’ve seen since 2014 — and a lot of that is getting people using Data Cloud, using these tools rather than just being given a demo.”
What’s new about Einstein Personalization
Salesforce Einstein has been around since 2016 and many of the use cases seem to have involved personalization in various forms. What’s new?
“Einstein Personalization is a real-time decision engine and it’s going to choose next-best-action, next-best-offer. What is new is that it’s a service now that runs natively on top of Data Cloud.” A lot of real-time decision engines need their own set of data that might actually be a subset of data. “Einstein Personalization is going to look holistically at a customer and recommend a next-best-action that could be natively surfaced in Service Cloud, Sales Cloud or Marketing Cloud.”
Finally, trust
One feature of the presentations at Connections was the reassurance that, although public LLMs like ChatGPT could be selected for application to customer data, none of that data would be retained by the LLMs. Is this just a matter of written agreements? No, not just that, said Jania.
“In the Einstein Trust Layer, all of the data, when it connects to an LLM, runs through our gateway. If there was a prompt that had personally identifiable information — a credit card number, an email address — at a mimum, all that is stripped out. The LLMs do not store the output; we store the output for auditing back in Salesforce. Any output that comes back through our gateway is logged in our system; it runs through a toxicity model; and only at the end do we put PII data back into the answer. There are real pieces beyond a handshake that this data is safe.”
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