Free Animated E-cards

Free animated ecards are available from a multitude of Internet sources including business, religious, personal, and non-profit websites. You can find a variety of free animated ecards that address any particular holiday, occasion, time of the year, special event or activity. If you need a free animated ecard to say you are sorry, you love someone, you are thankful or you are celebrating, there are unlimited free animated ecards to express just every human emotion. A free animated ecard is an easy and quick way to send anyone a special thought via the Internet. Free animated ecards have become wildly popular with the ease of Internet functions allowing web users the freedom to receive and send ecards that come in many different styles and designs. A user can find a free animated ecard that is humorous and displays cartoon clip art with cute quips. Beautifully illustrated, religious free animated ecards are also available offering recipients encouraging Bible verses. Free animated ecards displaying flash effects can be found through some sites that spark an enthusiastic response to anyone that receives it. A free animated ecard that displays realistic photography with colorful animation is an enjoyable offering to many web users. Although ecards can be purchased that sometimes offer a more personalized card or more professional design, free animated ecards have continued to flood the ecard market providing more than just free cards to users. A website that offers free animated ecards, receives varying benefits from their offers. Although offered at no charge to user, a free animated ecard is offered as a marketing method for many websites. Pulling in card users can also expose those who visit websites to the other products offered for sale. It is always a great marketing move for any website to offer something free within its other offers. A psychological 'good will' is forged with many consumers as well as receiving the free product. A free animated ecard can also be used to target a particular audience. For example, free animated ecards that provide a variety of occasional choices offered on florist delivery sites will appeal to consumers looking to also send floral arrangements and other delivery gifts to others. Another example is the huge religious interest in free animated ecards that spurs many consumers to visit sites offering other religious products as well. A free animated ecard offers something for everyone from sender to receiver. Any website that offers free animated ecards is not only providing a valuable service to web users, but will benefits from a smart consumer marketing technique. "Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others." (Philippians 2:4)

e-cards: E-Greetings Gain Ground at Businesses This Season

By MARIA ASPAN

Published: December 24, 2007

Have you sent out your holiday cards this year? What about your e-cards?

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Snowglobeboy.McKinney.com

An ad agency Web site shows an employee in a big snow globe.

Rattlebox.com

An e-card site video, “Have a trippy Christmas.”

If your second answer was yes, you are in good company. Once seen as the tacky, last-minute substitute for pen and paper, e-cards have become more acceptable this holiday season, especially in the corporate world, where LinkedIn and Facebook have become popular places for sending holiday greetings.

In other words: It’s no longer just a Merry Christmas. It’s another networking opportunity.

Many companies are embracing electronic greetings, which are cheaper, greener and more versatile than traditional cards and often look more sophisticated to pixel-trained eyes. Now that people have grown more nimble with online video, point-and-click holiday greetings have become a new palette for creativity, while static paper cards may induce a wince rather than a joyful noise.

“I probably received a tenth as many cards this year as last year, and a tenth as many last year as the year before,” said Brad Brinegar, the chairman and chief executive of McKinney, an advertising agency based in Durham, N.C.

When the time comes to design a traditional mail card, “usually I go, ‘Oh, God, not the Christmas card again.’ It either oversteps the bounds of good taste or is boring,” Mr. Brinegar said.

This year, his agency decided to do something slightly different. Instead of sending out the envelopes full of religion-neutral paper cheer, it staged a David Blaine-style stunt, asking one of its employees — Ben Eckerson, a 24-year-old broadcast producer — to spend several days in a life-size snow globe, where a Webcam streamed live video of him to the Internet.

McKinney sent about 400 holiday e-mails directing people to the site for “Snowglobe Boy” (snowglobeboy.mckinney.com), and the link went viral. By the end of Mr. Eckerson’s 78.5-hour ordeal, McKinney’s holiday e-greeting had appeared on YouTube, “The Early Show” on CBS and the computers of more than 45,000 viewers.

The agency did not save money — Mr. Brinegar said he had to buy more band width to support the extra traffic to the company’s Web site — but it did buy wider fame. “We live such busy lives, you don’t miss the thing that doesn’t come. You’re more surprised by the thing that comes,” Mr. Brinegar said.

Even among friends and family members, electronic holiday greetings are gaining popularity as people send less postal mail and grow more accustomed to living their lives online.

“We are doing the ‘save trees/our friends move too much and we can’t track addresses’ approach this year,” read one e-card from Beth Jacob-Files and Matt Files of Portland, Ore. They designed a photo-filled e-newsletter and sent it to about 75 friends and family members (though a few people who do not use e-mail got it the old-fashioned way).

“It was by far more cost and time efficient,” said Ms. Jacob-Files by e-mail. “I think it was more fun as well, because it provided us with an opportunity to creatively work together and reflect on our past year’s adventures.”

As user-generated Web content has taken hold, a small stable of Web sites like rattlebox.com and JibJab.com have begun offering customizable greetings, which let people add their own photos or personal messages to videos. A popular offering on rattlebox.com, an e-card site, has psychedelic images of Santa and spinning reindeer, and offers the sentiment, “Have a trippy Christmas.” (Note: This may not be the one to select for your boss.)

Sales of both traditional and electronic cards are difficult to track, but greeting card companies and trade groups say that traditional cards are still going strong. The Greeting Card Association, an industry trade group, estimates that sales of greeting cards are stable at about two billion holiday cards nationally every year out of seven billion cards sold annually. (The United States Postal Service also projects little change from previous years in the number of first-class letters sent in time for Christmas.)

E-card figures are more elusive, especially as the user-generated content trend nurtures small sites with interactive messages and videos. Hallmark estimates that about 300 million e-cards are sent every year, while American Greetings, one of the largest e-card makers, saw a 10 percent increase in traffic to sites this year. According to ComScore Media Metrix, 39.7 million people visited e-card sites in November, compared with 39.3 million in November 2006.

Corporate etiquette consultants say traditional cards are always a good idea. Ann Marie Sabath, who runs a company that gives lessons in business etiquette, said clients should receive paper cards, and colleagues and other business contacts can get e-mail greetings.

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Sending e-cards is “a form of social networking — you want to send an e-card to your colleagues,” she said. But paying clients may expect more from their professional advisers. “If they want to be green conscious, that’s fine, but they should also know who’s feeding them,” Ms. Sabath said.

Eric B. Rothenberg, a partner at the law firm O’Melveny & Myers who directs its green committee, said his firm sent about 10,000 e-cards this year, but individual partners sent out an additional 1,200 traditional cards at their own expense.

“There’s plenty of people who have a client base who think they’re not ready to convert yet,” he said. But the e-cards have been “pretty well received,” he added. “We’re sensitive to the fact that we have lots of clients who might not treat a paper card as kindly as they would in the past.”

Like many companies using e-cards this year, O’Melveny & Myers sent greetings as a simple image embedded in an e-mail message rather than as an attachment or a link. Mr. Rothenberg said his clients appreciate the thought, and the lack of flashy features made it easier for the greeting to get past corporate spam filters.

“Most of my clients don’t have that kind of time,” Mr. Rothenberg said. “I want them to see it and say, ‘That’s nice. That’s environmental,’ and then move on.”

Jessica S. Kleiman, the vice president of publicity for Hearst Magazines, said she switched to e-cards this year for practical reasons. As her staff has grown, “for every person to sign every card is extremely time-consuming and quite a production to organize,” she said.

Instead, she created an electronic image with all 11 signatures and zapped it effortlessly to more than 200 people. “We probably would have been a little bit more discriminating” when using paper and postage, Ms. Kleiman said. “I think we cast a wider net because we were able to do it easily.”

E-cards: Security

Since many e-card companies are privy to the e-mail address of the recipient and often also the sender, and whether the recipient reads the card, spammers can use E-Cards for finding active e-mail addresses.

Sending an e-card to a given recipient invariably involves giving that recipient's email address to the e-card service -- a third party. As with other third-party email services (such as mailing-list companies), the operator has the chance to misuse this address. One example of misuse is if the e-card service sends advertisements to the recipient's address. Under anti-spam rules used by major ISPs, such advertisements would be spam, since the recipient never asked ("opted in") to receive them.^[2] The e-card sender as well as the service could be held responsible for the act of spamming, since while the service sent the spam, the e-card sender provided the address.^{[citation needed]}

In some cases, it may be illegal for an organization or business to use an e-card service to send greetings to its customers. For instance, data privacy laws may forbid a business from disclosing information about customers to a third party -- including names and email addresses.^{[citation needed]}

In late June 2007 a spat of emails with the subject line "You've received a postcard from a family member!" and other similar subjects, was seen making their way across the internet. Unfortunately most of these emails contained links to malicious web sites where javascript was used to exploit the browser in order to compromise a system.

E-cardsTechnological Evolution

E-card technology has improved significantly since 1996 around the time of their inception. One technical aspect that has remained mostly contstant is the delivery mechanism: The e-mail received by the recipient contains not the e-card itself, but an individually coded link back to the publisher's web site that displays sender's card exactly as it was originally configured.

printed e-cards

Some e-cards are intended to be printed out rather than sent via e-mail, to most people however are not considered e-cards and are simply home-made greeting cards. The advantage to this over a traditional greeting sometimes can be cost savings, or sometimes simply the ability to "create" something for the recipient rather than choosing a fully completed paper card.

Using E-cards

Typically an e-card sender chooses from an on-line catalog of e-cards made available on a publisher's web site. After selecting a card, the sender can personalize it to various degrees by adding a message, photo, or video. Finally the sender specifies the recipient's e-mail address and the web site delivers an e-mail message on behalf of the sender to the recipient.

What is an e-card?

An e-card is similar to a postcard or greeting card, with the primary difference being it is created using digital media instead of paper or other traditional materials. E-cards are made available by publishers usually on various Internet sites, where they can be sent to a recipient, usually via e-mail.

E-cards are digital "content", which makes them much more versatile than traditional greeting cards. For example unlike traditional greetings, e-cards can be easily sent to many people at once or extensively personalized by the sender. Conceivably they could be saved to any computer or electronic device or even viewed on a television set, however E-card digital content has not yet progressed as far as digital video or digital audio in terms of varied usage.