best practice - link in ecard from store?

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Our online store is a catalog of giving opportunites. No actual merchandise is delivered, however, the donations made are usually honor/memorial gifts.We'd like to enable the "send an ecard" feature, but the ecards include a link right back to the online store. This shows the "gift" recipient the price of the gift, which seems pretty tacky. How is everyone else dealing with this? Do you leave ecards off or just let the recipients see the value of the honor gifts?

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  • You can design your eCard stationary to push that additional link pretty far down the page -- so it's after all of the fine print about where the eCard came from and less noticable to the recipient.  It may also be able to customize the email template to suppress that link.

    However, you may not want to be so quick to get rid of it -- as it may be a worthwhile way for you to advertise your store.  When I think about the commercial world of gift giving, pretty much all stores include some level of advertising in the package that they mail to the gift recipients -- whether that be a discount coupon for a purchase at the store or a full catalog which would likely include the price of whatever item arrived in that package.  Additionally, in many cases the beneficiary of a donation may want to know the amount that was donated on their behalf or in honor of their next of kin.  Anecdotally, I performed customer support triage for an "adoption center" for close to 2 years and never got a complaint from a donor about this link existing in the email.....

  • Michelle Shefter:

    You can design your eCard stationary to push that additional link pretty far down the page -- so it's after all of the fine print about where the eCard came from and less noticable to the recipient.  It may also be able to customize the email template to suppress that link.

    However, you may not want to be so quick to get rid of it -- as it may be a worthwhile way for you to advertise your store.  When I think about the commercial world of gift giving, pretty much all stores include some level of advertising in the package that they mail to the gift recipients -- whether that be a discount coupon for a purchase at the store or a full catalog which would likely include the price of whatever item arrived in that package.  Additionally, in many cases the beneficiary of a donation may want to know the amount that was donated on their behalf or in honor of their next of kin.  Anecdotally, I performed customer support triage for an "adoption center" for close to 2 years and never got a complaint from a donor about this link existing in the email.....

    This is a great idea, plus it gave me another idea. A very old HTML trick is to make text the same color as the background color. While that's no longer acceptable for SEM, it would also solve this problem. Thanks for the inspiration!

  • Cathy Qori:

    This is a great idea, plus it gave me another idea. A very old HTML trick is to make text the same color as the background color. While that's no longer acceptable for SEM, it would also solve this problem. Thanks for the inspiration!

    Great thinking, Cathy!  (I was going to suggest that but wasn't sure you could do it in an email stationary)

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