How to Send Free, Personalized eCards to Your Contacts: Animated, Scheduled and Tracked
A card arrives at the right moment and it lands differently than any email ever will: a birthday remembered, a thank-you that wasn't owed, a "thinking of you" that shows up unprompted. The problem has always been the friction: drive to a shop, or open a card site, hunt through a catalog, type in an email address you had to go find, pay for a single card, and hope it felt personal. For anyone who wants to do this often (for a whole client base, a team, a network), that friction is why the good intention never becomes a habit.
Margaret's eCards removes it. It's Trevally's built-in eCard studio, and because it lives on top of your contact base, the people you'd send a card to are already there, already organized. You design a card once, personalize it for everyone automatically, choose who gets it, and send, or schedule it to send itself, year after year. This is the complete guide.
What is Margaret's eCards?
Margaret's eCards is a small studio inside Trevally for creating and sending beautiful digital greeting cards to your contacts. Its home screen is an Overview that reports how your cards are performing (cards sent, open rate and click rate over time), with the rest of the studio one click away in the sidebar: Catalog, Send eCard, Campaigns, Scheduled, Analytics and Categories.
That framing matters: this isn't a one-off card generator bolted on the side. It treats greeting cards the way the rest of Trevally treats relationships: as something worth doing consistently and measuring.
Start from a template built for the occasion
Every card starts in the Catalog, organized by the occasions you actually send for: Birthday, Business, Congrats, General, Holiday, Photos, Thank You, Thinking of You and Wedding. Pick a category, search by name, and choose a starting point.
Templates aren't static pictures. They already carry personalization built in. A birthday card can read "Happy Birthday, {{first name}}!" out of the box, ready to address every recipient by name. You can send a template as-is, or use it as a foundation and make it entirely yours.
Design a card that feels like you
Hit Create Template and the studio opens with a live preview beside every control. Give the card a name and category, drop in an optional emoji, and choose a background: a gradient, a solid color, or your own image: a photo of the person, the team, the event.
Then the detail that makes these cards feel alive: animation. Backgrounds can move with a chosen animation effect, or stay clean and static if the moment calls for restraint. Every change renders instantly in the preview panel, and a Preview as recipient button shows the finished card exactly as the other person will see it.
Fine-tune every detail
Beyond the background, the type is fully yours to shape: font color, text alignment, font size from extra-small to display-large, an optional text highlight with adjustable opacity, and, the control people love, message position. Place the text on the image as an overlay, or above, below, left or right of a clean, uncropped photo.
Those options are why two cards built from the same template can look nothing alike: a photo card with the message tucked to the right, or a bold overlay on a moving gradient.
Personalize every card automatically
Here's where sending to many people stops meaning "impersonal." In the message, type {{ and insert any contact attribute from the recipient's card: first name, nickname, birthday, anything you store. Press Enter to insert it, or Shift+Enter to give it a fallback default.
Write "Hi {{first name}}" once, send to fifty people, and every card arrives addressed personally, pulled from the same contact cards Trevally built from your inbox. Add your signature, and use Preview as recipient to confirm exactly what will land:
Choose who receives it
Recipients come straight from your network. No addresses to hunt down. Search and pick individual contacts, or select a whole group: one of your contact lists, to card everyone at once.
Send one heartfelt card to one person, or a personalized card to your entire "Clients" list. The effort is the same.
Schedule ahead: let birthdays send themselves
You can send immediately, or set a Schedule date and time. And the setting that turns good intentions into a reliable system: Repeat. Set a card to repeat yearly, and it sends itself on that date every year. The birthday card you'll never again forget, queued once.
The Scheduled view keeps every queued and recurring card in one place, so what's coming is always visible. This is the difference between meaning to stay in touch and actually doing it. The same philosophy behind Trevally's relevance scoring, applied to the gestures that keep relationships warm.
Review and send, for free
The final step lays out everything for a last look (template, title, recipient count, signature and schedule) before you commit.
Two things worth saying plainly. First, it's free to start: eCards are part of your Trevally account, not a per-card checkout or a separate greeting-card subscription. Second, the recipient experience is frictionless: the card arrives by email, they open a little gift box to reveal it, and they can send a reply for free without creating an account. Every card is quietly signed "Sent with Margaret's eCards via Trevally."
Track what happens next
Physical cards vanish into a mailbox. eCards tell you what happened. Margaret's eCards turns that into real feedback.
Every batch you send becomes a Campaign, with live counts of clicked, opened, failed and conversion right on the card.
Analytics goes deeper: a delivery funnel (sent → opened → clicked), performance broken down by occasion, and a best-time-to-send heatmap showing which days and hours earn the most opens.
And down to the individual: a recent-activity tracker shows, per person, when each card was sent, opened and clicked.
For anyone using cards to nurture clients or a network, that visibility is the difference between hoping a gesture landed and knowing it did.
Margaret's eCards vs American Greetings, Hallmark, Paperless Post and JibJab
The eCard space has excellent, established names. In the interest of full disclosure (this is Trevally's blog, and Margaret's eCards is ours), here's an honest look at where each one shines, because they're built for genuinely different jobs.
| Margaret's eCards | American Greetings | Hallmark | Paperless Post | JibJab | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sends to your existing contacts & lists | Built on your contact base | Enter recipients | Enter recipients | Import/enter recipients | Enter/share link |
| Personalize at scale with merge fields | Any contact attribute | Basic personalization | Names into videos | ||
| Animated designs | Animated backgrounds | Animated & musical | Motion effects | Video-based | |
| Recurring auto-send (e.g. birthdays) | Yearly repeat | Reminders | Reminders | ||
| Open & click tracking / analytics | Funnel, heatmap, per-recipient | Delivery/opens | |||
| Build your own templates | Customize catalog cards | Customize catalog cards | Strong design tools | Within video formats | |
| Large professional catalog | Growing | Vast | Vast, licensed | Elegant | Video niche |
| Free to start | Free & paid | Subscription | Free & paid coins | Free & paid | |
| Part of a full contact/relationship platform |
full support · partial or limited · not offered
American Greetings is a vast, well-organized card destination covering essentially every theme and occasion: the reliable choice when you want to browse a huge catalog and send a polished one-off.
Hallmark is the legacy name in greeting cards, and that heritage carries online: thousands of designs, including animated and musical cards, with the brand recognition and licensed characters no one else can match. If the card itself is the gift, Hallmark's catalog is hard to beat.
Paperless Post is the design-lover's pick: elegant, sophisticated stationery and strong tools for beautiful invitations and group cards. When aesthetics and formal events lead, it's outstanding.
JibJab owns humor and video: its "Starring You" cards drop real faces into animated clips, and nothing else delivers that particular laugh.
Where Margaret's eCards is different: the others are card shops: you go there to browse and send a card to an address you supply. Margaret's eCards is an eCard studio inside your relationship platform. The cards go to contacts you already have, personalized at scale with real data, scheduled to recur, and tracked so you know they landed, all free to start. It won't out-catalog Hallmark or out-humor JibJab; it turns sending cards into a repeatable part of how you stay in touch with the people who matter.
Choose a dedicated card service if…
- You want the broadest possible catalog or licensed, brand-name designs for a special one-off: lean to American Greetings or Hallmark;
- Your priority is elegant invitations and formal group cards: Paperless Post excels;
- You want a funny, personalized video card: JibJab is unmatched.
Choose Margaret's eCards if…
- You send cards to people you already know and don't want to re-type addresses;
- You want to personalize at scale and schedule recurring cards (hello, every birthday);
- You want to know whether cards were opened, and keep the whole thing free to start inside the tool where your contacts already live.
Frequently asked questions
Can I send eCards for free? Yes, eCards are included in your Trevally account and free to start, with no per-card checkout or separate greeting-card subscription. Recipients can also reply for free without creating an account.
Can I schedule an eCard to send every year automatically? Yes. Set a schedule date and choose Repeat → Yearly, and the card sends itself on that date each year. Ideal for birthdays and anniversaries.
Are the eCards personalized for each recipient?
Yes. Type {{ in the message to insert any contact attribute (first name, nickname and more), so a single card addresses every recipient personally, with optional fallback defaults.
Can I tell if someone opened my eCard? Yes. Margaret's eCards records open and click events per recipient and rolls them up into open rate, click rate, a delivery funnel, performance by occasion and a best-time-to-send heatmap.
Who can I send eCards to? Any of your contacts or an entire contact list. The recipients are already in Trevally, so there's nothing to import.
References: competitor details reflect publicly available information about American Greetings, Hallmark, Paperless Post and JibJab as of July 2026, drawn from their sites and independent eCard roundups; features and pricing change. Check each provider for the current offering. All product names and marks belong to their respective owners. No third-party images are used in this article.
The best relationships are kept warm by small, consistent gestures. Margaret's eCards makes those gestures effortless: designed beautifully, personalized automatically, and sent right on time.
Connect your inbox for free and send your first eCard to someone who'd love to hear from you.