Stamp Out Christmas With Mobile Phone Cards
The traditional Christmas card will soon be consigned to history by individual mobile phone-based greetings cards, according to the founders of Stampster.co.uk, a new no-subscription picture customising website.
Stampster says that the number of Christmas messages sent by mobile phone has nearly doubled in three years. A 2005 YouGov survey of UK mobile trends found that 56% of Britons already wish their friends ‘Merry Christmas’ by mobile. A similar survey in 2002 found that just over 30% of Britons sent Christmas greetings this way.
And according to Stampster, the final nail in the coffin of the traditional card is the rise of picture messaging. With most modern mobiles featuring cameras and colour screens, Britons are bridging the gap between traditional cards and plain text messages by personalising their own pictures to send to the mobiles of friends and loved ones.
This is made easy by the Stampster website, which lets users upload photos, customise them by adding picture frames and send them to mobiles as a personal Christmas greeting or any type of message for just £1.50 per image sent, which is charged to the sender’s mobile phone bill.
Special Christmas Multi-Packs are also available, letting users generate a Stampster greetings card and bulk send it to ten friends for only £5 – meaning personalised mobile Christmas cards for only 50 pence.
Stampster co-founder Dominic Conlon said: “The death of the Christmas card by mobile message has been forecast since the start of the decade. But now that mobile users can have both the immediacy of texts with the emotions of a picture using Stampster, the traditional card’s days really are numbered.
“Traditional cards are associated with the older generation, while younger people prefer the fun and immediacy of making their own Christmas greeting. After over 150 years of sending cards by post, Christmas greetings are starting to move with the times – and at less than the price of an ordinary card plus postage.”
Add comment November 1st, 2005