Words are okay, graphics and standard photos are better, and your own photos are best. When you take the effort to capture the image (you do always carry a digital camera, right?), transfer it to your computer, crop and maybe enhance it a bit, and then upload it so you can use it creatively and effectively in a greeting card, you send a clear message of care and importance to the recipient. Standard cards with stock photos aren’t very likely to be put on someone’s refrigerator door, no matter how clever, but even a relatively poor photo of someone’s child has a high door-ability potential.
What photos should you use in greeting cards? The last thing you should do is send cards with photos of your products or your business. The best are photos of your clients, your friends, their families, their pets, their homes, cars, boats, or whatever - the focus (oops, an inadvertant camera joke snuck in) should be on them. If you don’t have and can’t easily get digital images of your clients, the next best idea is to use personal photos of yourself, your pets, or even your children. The point here is that the card is being sent to a friend, so why wouldn’t you include personal photos.
Remember to use fairly high resolution photos in your cards so when they’re printed the images will be clear. It’s also a good idea to crop the original images to remove extraneous background content (why have a card front with 2/3 blue sky for example). Other simple photo editing to consider is red eye repair and being sure the photo is bright enough – even most rudimentary photo editing programs can easily fix either problem. You don’t need to be fancy with your photographs in cards, but the better quality the photo the better impression the card will make.
Photo cards are much more likely to be saved, to be mentioned and even to be shown to others – so make the most of your greeting card marketing by utilizing personal photos whenever you can.
