Be it Christmas or Hanukkah, Bodhi Day or Samhain, in late December most people around the globe will be celebrating a special holiday, trying to be nicer to one another and spread good cheer.

Because the festive season is quickly approaching, you will surely need to send out quite a number of greeting cards – why not make them email greeting cards? Think about the environment (just the Christmas wrapping paper amounts to 50,000 trees cut down), about the poor postmen and, most of all, about your convenience!

Since all of us want to be nice and considerate, with the advent of computers also came the email greeting card (and later, the Christmas special offer sent by email). It’s easy, doesn’t cost anything and shows that you care, so why shouldn’t you send e-cards to everyone, right? No matter if you just want to send an email seasons greeting to your loved ones or if you’re a small business that has something special planned, you don’t want to spend time fiddling with lists of email addresses, nor with awkward programs or unintuitive interfaces as was the case a few years back. Another thing that could put you off this idea is that email greeting cards lack “soul” and almost always sound impersonal. This is because you have to write them in a very general manner, so that they can be sent to everyone: friends, colleagues , family (yes, I’m also talking about the email greeting card copy/pasting that goes on in larger offices).

This was OK 10 years ago, but I like to think that we, as people, users and consumers have evolved and now our tastes are much more refined (remember the Spice Girls or MySpace?). If you’re sending out a special offer to customers or an email card to your family, don’t fall into the routine of grabbing the first Christmas text you find on the web and pasting it into your email or reusing last year’s ones! Just think that your recipients will get quite a number of email greeting cards and if yours is identical to another one, then it will look like you sent it in a rush… it will also lack “that special something” that this season is so well known for. Let me put it like this: it’s like having a cheap plastic tree instead of a luscious, green one or receiving pajamas instead of that iPod you wanted.

Just remember: do your research and compose an email greeting card from the heart – I’m sure that your customers and loved ones will appreciate it and give something in return (’tis the season, after all).

To help you out, here are a few resources that we gathered up for your season email tasks:

Free Christmas graphics which you can use in your email greeting cards:

You can download them here: http://artdesigner.lv/archives/410, and in order to use them, just add the images to your email greeting card like you would do to a signature image.

Patterns for your email greeting card backgrounds:

Download here: http://www.psd-dude.com/tutorials/resources/photoshop-pattern-set-for-christmas-time.aspx.

Download here: http://www.colourlovers.com/pattern/1160912/white_christmas.

Download here: http://www.colourlovers.com/pattern/1203780/Christmas_wishin.

Download here: http://www.colourlovers.com/pattern/310016/White_Christmas.

You can also mix-and-match resources in a graphics program (even Paint will do) with a special font and create a customized header for your email greeting cards! Examples of good, Christmas-y fonts are:

Download here: Kingthings Christmas font.

Download here: Christmas Card font.

Wouldn’t that look nice? Now, just compose a short text (people are busy and won’t take the time to read a page-long email greeting card) and you’re all set!

The title of this week’s article says that you can send your email greeting cards in just 5 minutes… how so? With the help of elves, magic and good ol’ Outlook, of course! Since it’s designed specifically for tasks such as this, I strongly recommend that you try out our best-selling add-in, Easy Mail Merge for Outlook. I know I may seem biased, but believe me – it’s much better to concentrate your energy on the recipients and actual message than on how to send it, and our add-in will be of great help! It’s wonderfully simple: you just start it up, choose your friends and family that you want to send email greeting cards to, then compose and click on Send – the management, personalization and so on is done automatically by Easy Mail Merge. If you want to add a special touch and make your email cards seem like you’ve composed them manually with love and care, then our Outlook add-in lets you create complex custom scenarios and personalize the emails, so that each recipient gets a personal one. We’ve already described a few tricks to mail merges, just visit the following links to see how you can send a great email greeting card campaign:

• Personalize mass emails in Outlook

• How to add an attachment to a mail merge email in Outlook

But don’t take my word for it! Just download the trial version from our website and see for yourself, or just go ahead and beat the rush by buying a full license for only $29.95 (contact us at support@emailaddressmanager.com to receive your 10$-off Christmas coupon) from here (30-day money-back guarantee)!

We here at DS Development would like to thank you for the continuing support and wish you all the best this holiday season! We hope that Santa will bring you everything you wished for and a better world for us all.

 

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