If you only send standard greeting cards in your business marketing program, this tip won’t matter too much, because standard business greeting cards are typically thrown in a basket, taped or tacked to the wall, or thrown out. However, if you create custom greeting cards, especially with compelling photos of the recipient, or of you, or either’s business, there’s a better chance the person who gets the card may want to display it. And in that case, I strongly suggest you created portrait mode cards – they stand up better.
Horizontal cards are certainly attractive and if you use full bleed images odds are the cards will be in landscape mode. However, horizontally oriented cards don’t usually stand up very well.
Your goal is to either show up at a client’s home or office and see your card proudly displayed on a desk, counter, mantle, table or some other horizontal surface. Likely your client won’t put it there just so you can see it, but so others can see it, too – so here’s an easy, almost automatic way to help your clients and customers market and advertise for you.
So get used to either taking photos or cropping them so they’ll print on the front of a vertically oriented card. It’s a small technique, but we find it works quite well. In fact, we didn’t think of this, but discovered it when we visited clients and also when we tried to display cards in our own office.
