Showing you care

Paper cards are a well-established way of letting people know we care about them. In the tradition of gifting, the more effort, time and cost it takes to create, send and deliver a card or gift the better. A £10 gift is better than a £1 gift but not as good as a £100 gift. A hand made card is better than a cheap store-bought card but hand delivered flowers might trump both.

Getting it right

However, just having a larger impact doesn’t mean the gift is better. It also needs to be appropriate. The suitable gift or card is related to the initial gesture that the card is responding to or the strength of the emotion you wish to convey. If a friend bought you a £10 gift and in response you sent a £100 thank you present, you might embarrass the original sender. If you are one week into a new relationship, then giving too generous a present might send your new partner running. Similarly, if a friend bought you an extravagant gift and you responded with only a small note then it might seem you did not appreciate the original gift enough to muster a significant display of gratitude. 

The Generosity Hierarchy

When it comes to eCards, the first thing to consider is whether they need to deliver the impact of paper cards. Are they substitutes competing with one another or do they sit at different levels in this generosity hierarchy? With extravagant gifts sitting at the very top and a text message sitting just above ‘doing nothing’ at the bottom we think that eCards sit a few rungs up from a text message. Sitting above an eCard is a paper card followed by a hand-written letter and so on up the scale. However, there is a cross over: in the way that a very short hand written letter might be outdone by a very fancy paper card, a tacky paper card is perhaps lower on the scale than a classy eCard. 

When an eCard is just right 

We think that the time for an ecard is when you need something bigger than a text message. Whether that’s to say Thank You or Happy Birthday, you’ve missed the post and you need something now. It’s a friend who might think a text message doesn’t quite cut it or perhaps it’s Mothers Day or Fathers Day and you need something now that’s going to let them know you really care about them. Perhaps a friend bought you a coffee and you want to say a quick thank you that’s just a bit more sincere than a text. In that instance, what could say it better than Thanks a Bunch by Cara Watson.