Greeting Cards Capture Emotions

I laughed, I cried, my soul was touched. All these emotions came from reading greeting cards at my local gift store.

Relatively inexpensive and easy to display, greeting cards are a compliment to any existing product line you carry. In fact, gift givers are more likely to purchase a greeting card at the same place in which they purchased the gift. In essence, you have a captive buying audience. You sell a gift and the greeting card purchase is inevitable. It’s as simple as that.

What You Need To Know About Greeting Cards

Over 7 billion dollars worth of greeting cards are purchased each year. To effectively capture a piece of this market, it is important to know the ins and outs of the greeting card world. Seasonal and every day are the two categories which divide the greeting card market.

Seasonal greeting cards are just as the name implies; cards revolving around a holiday season. For example Christmas cards, Halloween cards, Easter cards, Valentines Day cards, and Mother’s/Father’s Day cards, as well as graduation cards are all considered seasonal or holiday cards. These types of cards account for 50% of greeting card sales. In this group, Christmas cards are the big sellers with 60% of the category’s sales.

All other cards are lumped into a category called everyday. These cards revolve around events that can occur on any given day. Birthday cards, sympathy cards, congratulation (wedding/engagement) cards, anniversary cards along with friendship cards make up the everyday card group. Parallel to the Christmas cards in sales, birthday cards are the top seller in this category.

We’ve shown you the numbers on why greeting cards are good sellers, what greeting cards are and the identifiable groups they belong to. But, you want the answer to the most important greeting card question “how do you sell them?”

Greeting card marketing is kind of like that movie “Field Of Dreams”. You know the one where Kevin Costner builds a baseball field on the premise “build it they will come”. Greeting cards are that field. Select good wholesale greeting card suppliers with themes in line with your products and they will sell.

Tips For Selecting And Selling Greeting Cards

A tip to keep in mind when selecting card from your wholesale greeting card vendor is balancing trendy with traditional. You will want a combination of trendy as well as classic greeting cards. Trendy cards are those types that play music, have led lights along with movable artistry, or even humorous political cards. Classic cards are the cards that are timeless. They follow a pattern that has been seen for ages. For example, classic greeting cards are often the Mother’s Day cards embellished with calligraphy and floral pictures or wedding cards with a very formal and proper tone. However, that doesn’t mean this is the only style for these types of cards. With greeting cards, you have the many options running the gamut from humorous to classic and from artistic to cartoonish.

A versatile assortment is the strategy that works best for most gift shops. Carry a wide selection in both the seasonal and everyday categories. Select cards that set you apart from the crowd. Look for quirky cards that most people won’t find in the “marts”. Find cards that evoke an emotional response. The idea with greeting cards is to affect the person purchasing the card. Greeting card buyers want to feel emotion because they are using the card to send an emotional message.

“Heavy on the holidays” is a strategy that suits flower shops. Weight your seasonal selection with more Mother’s day and Valentine’s Day cards as convenient add-on sales. However, a few every day cards will still be needed. Don’t forget the blank greeting cards which are fantastic ways for customers to personalize their floral gifts.

Greeting your customers with seasonal and everyday cards puts you in the game with the potential to win a piece of a 7 billion dollar market. Your “Field Of Dreams” resides in greeting cards sales. Offer a card for every occasion and they will sell.

The wholesale greeting card vendors at FGmarket can provide all your cards needs from humorous to sentimental, from classic to trendy and from quirky to cards made from recycled paper. To jump start your search for the perfect greeting cards for your store, we have profiled a few of the many wonderful greeting card companies available through the FGmarket wholesale directory.