As the internet has made its way into virtually every home in the industrialized world, email greeting cards have become more and more popular. The advantages of sending email greeting cards versus traditional cards are plentiful. Cards arrive in an instant rather than at the whims of the postal service, there is virtually no cost to send an email greeting card and you never have to leave the comfort of your home to brave parking lots and long lines at cash registers. Email greeting cards come in all shapes and sizes and many contain animation or sound to make the cards that much more appealing to the recipients. The selection online is vast – much more than you will find in even the largest card store.

There are hundreds of sites that offer online greeting cards – from sites owned by traditional card companies, to online-only sites. Some of the sites are free and require nothing more than creating an account, while others have begun charging a monthly or annual subscription rate to help defray the costs of their services. There is very little difference between the products offered by free sites and subscription sites, other than the fact that many of the free sites support their products by placing advertising around the greeting cards. In addition, most of the sites don’t send the actual card, but instead send a link back to see the card on the website that it was sent from. This is often seen as suspicious by the recipient, and cards are sometimes delivered straight to the spam folder because they contain links to a site that is not on the recipients list of safe senders. Unfortunately though, the idea of linking back to the greeting card website has gained more and more traction as the animated cards have become more popular, however one should think carefully about whether sending an animated card is worth the possibility that the card will not be received.

Some sites deliver cards directly to the recipient’s inbox. One such site,Scheduled Cards, not only sends the card image and text directly in an email, but have developed scheduling features that allow users to pre-schedule cards for almost all occasions for every one of the sender’s contacts. Although it’s slightly less personal than creating an individual card each time the necessity arises, it does guarantee that you won’t miss an occasion, or forget to send a card.

Although it might still be considered more “proper” to send an actual greeting card through the mail, email greeting cards are an efficient solution for making sure that occasions aren’t forgotten.