For the Holidays, Paper or Electronic?

Online Greetings Have Yet to Distract from Traditional Cards

Holiday cards for Hanukkah and Christmas are shown on display at Rod's Hallmark store in Lawrence, Kan. (Orlin Wagner - AP - AP)

The online greeting card, or e-card, seems a natural progression of our increasingly wired society that ditches newspapers for blogs, television for YouTube and handwritten letters for e-mail. The new media is cheaper, customizable and on-demand. But for the holidays, some say it's better to forgo convenience for the sentimentality of a paper card.

Kelly Hucul, 31, said she sends paper cards, even for minor holidays such as Halloween. "You make the time for the things you want to do," she said. While she noted that free e-cards or a subscription to an online greeting card site might save money, she said she hasn't found a site that can regularly meet her needs and prefers instead to search for cheap cards at Eastern Market in Washington, D.C., or on sale at retail stores.

While sending cards online might save some time, Hucul said that sending one doesn't show the same amount of consideration as paper. "I was raised with the idea that you show people you care for them in the action and effort you make towards them."

Even a decade after online greetings danced their way into inboxes, Americans continue to spend $7.5 billion on paper cards per year, according to Greeting Card Association spokesperson Barbara Miller.

"Everyone assumes somehow that e-greetings have pulled away from paper cards," Miller said. Yet almost all of the trade association's members surveyed reported that e-greetings actually haven't impacted them, she said. "In essence, they're different mediums," she said. "One does not substitute for the other."

But others tout online greetings' advantages. "E-cards are more convenient, cheaper and better for the environment, said Paris Ward of Arlington, Va., who said in an e-mail that she goes digital for nearly all the greetings she sends. "I'm a procrastinator when it comes to special occasions ... if you forget an event or wait until the last minute, you can still send a greeting [that day online]."

Ward subscribes to AmericanGreetings.com, which charges $13.99 for unlimited access to sending its e-cards. For the 90 percent of households sending an average of 35 cards annually, according to the Greeting Card Association, an e-greetings subscription can produce savings on card purchases and postage.

American Greetings Interactive imposes a subscription fee for access to most of the cards on its partner sites, such as bluemountain.com and egreetings.com, said Sally Babcock, senior vice president at AGI. Although many cards are still available for free online, its subscription base reached 2.5 million last January, according to a company report.

Ward said she thinks it's worth the price. "It was fairly inexpensive, saves the hassle of going shopping for a card and is the only way to get the high-quality animated greeting cards," she said.

Hallmark takes a different approach. It offers all its e-cards for free on its Web site as a marketing tactic to drive traffic, said Hallmark spokeswoman Kristi Ernsting. Unlike virtually all other free cards, the company adds no outside advertisements, and while registration is required to send the card, the process is designed to be quicker than at comparable sites.

Ernsting said that overall, e-cards are a complement to, but not a replacement of paper greetings, especially for closer relatives. Americans send about 6 billion paper cards each year -- 20 times the amount of the 300 million e-greetings sent online, she said.

The majority of e-card senders are the same people who send the most paper cards -- middle-aged women. "What we find is card people are card people," AGI's Babcock said. She added that this demographic dominates whether the cards are available for free or as part of a paid subscription that is required to access most of its cards.

Aside from formality and tradition, another reason e-cards may not have penetrated as much as other online products is the lack of high quality, free substitutes that don't burst with pop-up ads and animation. While paid sites eliminate most of these distractions, there are a limited number of providers consumers can choose from.

Some online products balance personalization and computer-aided efficiency. Card creation tools at Web sites such as http://www.bhg.com/ecards/, the interactive companion to Better Homes and Gardens magazine, offers a free tool (registration required) guiding users through a simple process of creating their own e-cards by uploading and editing photos, adding their own text and customizing its style.

"I feel like our generation doesn't really appreciate paper cards or see the point to them because they just kind of take up space, and they're nice to look at maybe, but there's no practical use for them," Ward, who is 21, said.

Not everyone who grew up in the era of going online for homework help agrees. Lauren Stone, 23, of Chicago, said she has kept greeting cards since childhood and that it's the proliferation of e-mail that makes paper cards even more significant. "E-mails are more common and people can pass over them pretty quickly," she said. "There is something more personal and personally gratifying about getting snail mail."

It's that sentimentality that greeting card companies are counting on to keep business strong. "The appeal of a greeting card has always been the keepsake value," Miller, of the Greeting Card Association, said. "[Cards] that mean the most to people they keep for their entire lives."