It is traditional to send a greeting to your customers at year end as a way of thanking them for their custom. But whether it is a Christmas greeting or a New Year’s wish it is important that you take the marketing opportunity that presents itself. Many companies opt for a wall calendar and that is an excellent choice – but a good calendar can cost a fortune and an inexpensive one can send out the wrong message about your company. So how do you achieve the happy medium? I think that we can help…

 It could be that you are looking for a calendar that offer “something different”; a promotional Christmas product that your customer hasn’t seen before. In that case you could go for a pop up calendar which not only offers the instant impact of the pop up action such as our pop-up cube shaped calendar or you might want a product which has the added appeal of being a somewhat unusual shape for a desk calendar. We have three such products – the pop up house, the Hexapop and our pop up ball.

 The Hexapop was introduced to our range in 2008 and so it is new to the Christmas market. Its overall shape is hexagonal but it is made up of twelve triangular faces – each of which can be custom printed with the dates for each of the 12 months. You might want to consider the pop-up snowflake as a variation on this Christmas idea as that product has 14 panels – 7 on each side. That gives 6 panels for January to June plus one panel for your logo or Christmas marketing message. Turn over for July to December and another marketing message!

The annual quest to find something different for a Christmas promotion might just end here! All of our Christmas products are perfectly suitable for sending through the post and so they make an excellent choice as Christmas Mailers for direct marketing campaigns. They offer the elements of fun and surprise which is a perfect theme for this fun time of year and will give plenty of scope to develop creative Christmas advertising ideas.  They are very tactile and hard to put down which is exactly what you want from Christmas advertising products. They tend to be kept and are always remembered. All of these points make our range of Christmas promotional products an ideal inclusion in your Christmas advertising campaign. If you are looking for Christmas print with a difference our promotional Christmas products can provide the answer.

Whilst a traditional card is fine for delivering a business greeting at Christmas, will it get noticed in amongst all the other company Christmas cards in your customer’s office? If you are going to go to the effort of sending a business Christmas card shouldn’t it be working for you? Our range of 3-D Christmas pop-ups and pop up Christmas cards will add a different dimension to your company’s Christmas greeting.  Corporate cards can be very samey but a corporate Christmas card from our range of Christmas greetings will have bags of punch and vitality. Custom Christmas cards are obviously unique and as all of our products start life as a completely blank canvas, your designers can create totally unforgettable corporate Christmas cards.

Whilst most of our range features products that are designed with that little bit of “something different” to enable them to stand out in a crowd there are times when that extra wow factor just isn’t quite appropriate. Something a little more understated might be required – even at Christmas! That is where our push up and stand up range comes in. It doesn’t mean that the personal touch is lost as each of these Christmas products features bespoke printing and they can all be designed to your specific requirements. Let’s look at the individual cases.

Cardboard engineering techniques play a large part in the success of these promotional products but the key is to keep it simple. The most popular pop up movements are created using what are known as “V” folds and parallelograms. These are two relatively simple mechanics which produce very satisfactory results for your pop up card. The beauty of keeping things simple is that it keeps costs affordable whilst still giving you a totally unique bespoke Christmas greetings card. Of course, the pop up card doesn’t have to be used as a Christmas card; it could be used for any Christmas marketing application. It would be suitable as an invitation to a Christmas event, or to carry product information in a Christmas promotion for example. But no matter what use you decide on for your pop-up marketing piece you can rest assured that it will be totally unique to your company this Christmas!

The simplest idea in this section belongs to our mini showcards. The product is nothing more than a card with a strut at the back which enables it to stand up on your customer’s desk. However, that very simple standing mechanism makes it different from all other standard Christmas cards and that in itself makes it a product worth consideration. Add the fact that it can be cut to any shape that you like and suddenly it can become a very attractive proposition as a bespoke Christmas greeting. Printing it as a calendar is another option which makes it a candidate for this year’s company Christmas card!

Everyone wants their own company Christmas promotion to stand out above the rest and yet so many campaigns just seem to regurgitate hackneyed images and themes. A Christmas promotion should have something to lift it in a very crowded market. Our range of interactive promotional products can provide that lift with their captivating and sophisticated movements.

You can almost guarantee that this is one Christmas promotion that will be passed all around your customer’s office. It is one of those that you just can’t put down! Our Flicker Card is probably the most animated interactive product in our Christmas Marketing range and it is very addictive. Open the cover to reveal a pull-tab. Pull it and watch the action as the pages of the book flick over in rapid succession. With the right graphics the images on the pages can look as if they are moving.

Now you see it – now you don’t! That’s the fascination of our Push’n’Pull card, an interactive promotional product with a sophisticated internal pulley system which gives it a reciprocal action. Pull the card out from the bottom and another card appears simultaneously from the top. Push the card back in and the other one disappears inside the sleeve at the very same time. This particular product is very popular as an invitation or publicity piece for Christmas events as well as being chosen as a corporate Christmas greeting.

Our Starburst products get their name from the clever folding technique which sort of looks like a starburst pattern when it is opening - including close relative, the Starburst Cross. The big surprise is that it opens to reveal a display that is a lot larger than you would ever expect. The fold is very versatile and allows us to make covers that are almost circular as well as rectangular. Like all of our products, the Starburst has year-round appeal but it does seem to be particularly popular come Christmas time when it is often used as an invitation to corporate Christmas parties and to seasonal events.

Promotional information for cold and flu remedies, facts about throat pastilles and other such pieces of information are typical of the use of wheel charts. It’s not so much a Christmas thing rather than being related to winter. The benefits of hot, warming soups have also been extolled through this medium as a winter season promotional item.

As you can see, each product in the featured range offers a different type of movement and has varying levels of sophistication in order to suit many different Christmas marketing applications. From a company Christmas greeting to an invitation to a Christmas event these interactive products present an excellent opportunity to put your Christmas promotion head and shoulders above your competitors efforts.

When you consider the requirement for your own Christmas greeting to send to your customers, you will no doubt want to be associated with feelings that are happy. At times like these, when the economic climate is not too hot, it is particularly important that you also try to send out a positive message about your own company. The choice of greeting becomes all-important and sending out a run-of-the-mill greeting card does little in the way of sending a big message. An ordinary Christmas card is quite possibly what you sent last year and the year before that when the economy was better and most businesses had greater confidence in the future.

Christmas decorations and Christmas tree ornaments play a big part in giving the Christmas period a festive and happy quality and these are the sort of feelings that your company Christmas greeting can be associated with by choosing a product like this over a standard greeting card. “All well and good”, you might say, “but how am I going to get a message onto a Christmas tree ornament? How will I send it through the mail without it costing a fortune or getting broke? And won’t my ornament just get hung on the Christmas tree in my customer’s office with all the others that are brought out for an annual airing?”

These are all good and valid questions but there are products in the UK promotions market that give all the right answers. A Christmas decoration or Christmas tree ornament doesn’t have to be made from glass or plastic. It can just as easily be made from board and by using sophisticated cardboard engineering techniques, different automatic pop-up decorations can be custom-made. Your own company graphics and messages can be printed over the whole thing. Now can you see the possibilities opening up?

The fact that these cardboard engineered products can fold flat and they can also be supplied with custom made all-board envelopes makes them a perfect choice for a Christmas mailing. Add to those basic requirements the all-important fact that these products will jump out into your customer’s hands when the pack is opened and you will see how a positive message is easily reinforced. On top of that, products such as these are far more likely to be passed around your customer’s office for others to see than a simple Christmas card would ever be.

But what about the chances of it being hung on your customer’s Christmas tree with all of the other baubles? The answer is to make it too big to go on the tree. Also, make your selection jewel-shaped so that it will have flat edges and flat panels that will enable it to stand on your customer’s desk and might not even need the addition of a hanging device. Also, ask the manufacturer to add a gloss laminated finish to make it more shiny and attractive. It is then much more likely to be displayed in a prominent position in your customer’s office.

We have included four jewel-shaped pop up products in the Christmas decorations section as they all make very attractive Christmas decorations with the addition of a decorative loop of either gold or silver elastic. The pop up snowflake has always proved to be very popular every Christmas season as has the bold figure of the pop-up diamond. The hexapop is new to the range this year and the Johnson 13 was released only last November.