5 Best Holiday eCard Sites for Businesses & Associations

Businesses strengthening relationships with clients, employers recognizing staff, and associations engaging members share one thing in common: personalization as the golden standard of outreach. That’s why greeting cards are such a popular way to reach audiences, especially during the holidays. People value personal connections, and tailored messages are a surefire way to foster them. 

Enter eCards: the digital spin on the traditional greeting card. If your organization wants to revamp its outreach strategy this holiday season—or any other time of year—you must leverage a holiday eCard site that makes digital greeting cards easy and engaging. 

To help you find the perfect fit, we’ve compiled our list of best holiday and year-round eCard sites for businesses and associations. Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Why Use eCards for the Holidays?
• Criteria for Choosing the Best eCard Site
• 5 Best eCard Sites for Businesses & Associations

We’re sure this guide will provide the context you need to choose the perfect eCard site.

Why Use eCards for the Holidays?

The holiday season is a popular time to wish someone well with a greeting card. The proof is in the numbers: Americans purchase over six billion greeting cards each year, with around one-third of those sales going toward seasonal cards. However, the rise of technology is making physical mail a strategy of the past, with total mail volume declining since 2006. 

eCards offer numerous benefits for organizations that want to reach their audiences in a personal yet modern way. That’s because eCards offer these benefits:

• Eco-friendliness: 66% of consumers report sustainability as one of their top five considerations when making a purchase. This means over half of your members, staff, customers, and other stakeholders are looking for sustainable alternatives. By avoiding paper and physical delivery emissions, eCards provide a waste-free option.
• Customization: eCards are more flexible than their paper counterparts, allowing senders to customize the message and branding of each card. Since personalized emails receive open rates that are 82% higher than generic ones, your audience will be excited to see customized eCards in their inboxes.
• Instant Delivery: Organizations must balance the thoughtfulness behind personalization with the administrative burden it places on their teams. For example, writing a Christmas card for each of your association’s members can be thoughtful but time-consuming, especially around the holidays when post offices often experience delays. Digital greeting cards can reach recipients no matter where they are with just a few clicks.

Not to mention, eCard sites empower you to engage with your audience in ways beyond seasonal greetings. For example, employee recognition eCards offer all the above benefits and foster a healthy workplace culture.

While these are just a few benefits that eCards bring to season’s greetings, different platforms have unique strengths that provide additional benefits to their users. Before choosing a platform for your organization, you need to know the basic features your eCard site should offer.

Criteria for Choosing the Best eCard Site

Whether you’re searching for community engagement platforms, bookkeeping systems, or an eCard site, there will always be must-have features that make your technology successful. For example, what would a community engagement platform be without event management tools? Or, how would bookkeeping software benefit your organization without the ability to generate financial reports?

Here are the baseline capabilities your eCard site should be able to handle:

• User-friendliness: Whether your team consists of tech-savvy designers or first-time users, your eCard site should accommodate their needs. Look for a platform with an intuitive interface, including drag-and-drop design tools or pre-made templates. Also, customer support resources, such as tutorials and FAQs, should be available for help if needed.
• Customization options: To achieve personalization, you’ll need a flexible platform with adequate tools for customizing your eCards. This includes the ability to add holiday-themed visuals, personalized greetings, and tailored calls to action. Prioritize integration capabilities to ensure you can leverage the data stored in your constituent relationship management (CRM) system or other relevant platforms.
• Ability to reach the intended audience: Solutions catered to your organization’s specific needs ensure you can create eCards that resonate with your unique audience. For example, a platform built for retail businesses might not be useful for an association launching a campaign for its new members. Look for specialized features and integration capabilities to ensure your industry-specific software is compatible with your eCard site.

At the end of the day, your organization likely won’t implement an eCard site to celebrate just one day of the year. Choosing a platform that offers robust capabilities for year-round use is essential to engaging your organization’s audience 365 days a year.

5 Best eCard Sites for Businesses & Associations

With a list of must-have features you’re looking for in a holiday eCard site, it’s time to start your research. We’ve compiled a list of our favorite options, which you can compare to determine the best fit for your organization.

As you move through the list, request demos with your favorite providers to see their software in action. After all, the best way to experience a platform’s functionality is to try it yourself!

Here’s how our top choices break down:

1. Best Overall eCard Site: eCardWidget

eCardWidget stands out as the best overall choice for its versatility and powerful capabilities. Its comprehensive suite of features is designed to meet the diverse needs of for-profit and nonprofit organizations, including associations.

eCardWidget is easy to use, from implementation to post-outreach analysis. Users can start designing holiday eCards in just a few simple steps:

1. With the user-friendly designer, create professional eCards using free templates, graphics, fonts, and all the colors you could possibly need. You can even upload your own graphics, like your logo.
2. Organize your eCards into campaigns, such as a Valentine’s Day or year-end holiday campaign.
3. Either upload your eCards to your website or use the free hosted landing page eCardWidget provides.
4. Start sending! Just show your team and supporters how to use the tool, whether they’re sending eCards to members, clients, or their peers.

Best of all, eCardWidget offers robust reporting tools, allowing you to see who sends, receives, and responds to all eCards sent through the platform. This way, you can easily track constituent relationships and engagement levels and adjust your approach as needed.

Some of eCardWidget’s other key features include:

• Automation capabilities to send eCards without manual intervention
• Fully customizable email templates
• Over 3,000 software integrations
• Mobile responsive design
• Easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface

eCardWidget combines customization and user-friendliness in a well-rounded tool for associations, nonprofits, and businesses. Whether you aim to improve member engagement, customer acquisition, or employee recognition this holiday season, eCardWidget has a long list of use cases to meet your specific needs. 

2. Hallmark eCards: Best eCard Site for Video

When it comes to greeting cards, Hallmark is one of the biggest players in the game. Their online greeting card creation platform allows you to create eCards with photos and videos for a memorable design.

This eCard site’s standout features include:

• Hundreds of templates for various holidays and occasions
• Easy uploading to add photos and videos to chosen templates
• Mobile capabilities for delivering eCards via text message

If your organization has the perfect photo to accompany your holiday eCard, browse Hallmark’s templates to find the perfect fit.

3. JibJab: Best Site for Humorous Holiday eCards

Famous for its quirky Christmas greeting videos, JibJab is the perfect eCard site for adding laughter to your holiday season. This platform offers unique features, including:

• Face personalization, which allows users to add photos of themselves or their recipients to amusing animations.
• Animated templates, ranging from videos of dancing elves to silly turkeys.
• Social media sharing across platforms such as Facebook and Instagram

Because of its niche templates, JibJab may be better suited for creating and sharing eCards among peers or family members rather than organization-wide customer or member engagement campaigns. 

4. Canva: Best Platform for Graphic Design

Canva is the perfect eCard site for creating eCards from scratch and accessing ultimate design freedom. Its extensive library of customizable templates enables users to adjust practically every element of the eCard to create stunning designs.

Its standout features include:

• Advanced design tools, such as custom graphics and video elements
• Collaborative tools so designers can work together on the same eCard
• Templates for every occasion

For businesses or associations that want to build their own eCards (and other graphic design materials) this holiday season, Canva is a great pick. Keep in mind that as a graphic design tool, Canva doesn’t offer eCard-sending services, meaning your organization will need to send designs built on this eCard site manually.

5. Jacquie Lawson: Best eCard Site for Intricate Art

From watercolor creations to intricately designed animations, Jacquie Lawson is an eCard site known for its miniature works of art. A membership grants users access to:

• A vast library of eCard templates with unique, hand-drawn designs
• An address book and reminders for recipients’ birthdays
• A helpline for troubleshooting any problems you encounter

While these designs are hard to beat, it’s worth noting that customization is limited on this eCard site. Businesses and associations using Jacquie Lawson’s eCards must find unique ways to incorporate their brand identity into campaigns.

More Tips and Tools for Engaging Your Community

Engaging your community—whether clients, employees, or members—is about more than a themed greeting card around popular holidays. Your organization must foster meaningful connections with its audience that last well beyond the holiday season. 

eCard sites are a great starting point, but other tools are available to help you facilitate engagement year-round. Once you’ve chosen the right eCard platform, explore other tools that would make helpful additions to your existing tech stack.

To learn more about how eCards and other platforms fuel community engagement, check out these resources:

• How to Use Charity Christmas eCards to Boost Year-End Gifts. If you run an association or nonprofit, eCards make a great holiday fundraiser! Discover how and why to sell festive greeting cards to supporters.
• Member Engagement: 9 Creative Ideas to Excite Your Community. Digital greeting cards are just one way to engage association members. Explore other creative ideas to cultivate stronger relationships and boost renewals.
• Community Management Software for Associations: 10 Options. Building an online community will bring members together between events. Learn more about this type of software and review top options.