How CardSnacks eCards Got 40.000 5-Star Reviews: Q/A with CEO Mark Wachen

Website Planet had the chance to sit down and chat with Mark Wachen, CEO of CardSnacks, the best-selling eCard card platform on the iOS and App store, with a clientele in the order of the tens of thousands.

We learnt how their eCards and gift cards help businesses stay in touch with prospects and clients, increase customer retention, and keep the best talents with them.

Let’s introduce CardSnacks to our audience. What is it and how does it work?

CardSnacks is the leading eCard platform for individuals and businesses to send personalized e-greetings and gift cards. We offer more than 5,000 different card covers, and users can design their own, which they send via text or email. Cards can be customized with text, photos, videos, audio, badges, emojis, and much more. Additionally, it is very easy to send a gift card from any one of more than 400 leading retailers, or CardSnacksCash, which allows recipients to choose their own gift card on the CardSnacks platform.

Business owners often use our cards to increase talent retention, which is a top concern for leadership at many, perhaps most, businesses. Team members who feel valued and appreciated are less likely to quit than people who feel taken for granted. The CardSnacks for Business platform is a way for managers, leaders, or HR executives, to power employee recognition programs, in addition to sending holiday or milestone greetings. Any company that is sincere about talent retention can find good use for CardSnacks.

With CardSnacks, you can track open rates and interaction rates, where almost all of our companies see much better results than what they see with typical email or text-based campaigns. And talking interactions, most business users very much value the direct feedback they receive from recipients. In fact, CardSnacks allows recipients to send a note back to the sender to acknowledge and offer thanks for the card, they can see both quantitatively and qualitatively how their outreach is working.

Other companies use CardSnacks to stay in touch with clients or potential clients. One of our real estate customers uses CardSnacks in place of a business card during networking events. This allows him to stay top-of-mind to potential new prospects or business partners compared with a regular paper business card. He also sends greeting cards to clients after touring a home or to congratulate them on the purchase of their forever home.

We’ve sent millions of cards and gift cards over the past few years, so it’s rewarding to know that we’ve made so many people smile with personalized, heartfelt birthday cards, work anniversary cards, get well soon cards, and so much more. We’re received over 40,000 5-star reviews in the iOS App Store with an average rating of 4.8 out of 5. Also, hundreds of companies, from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies, are using CardSnacks every day for employee recognition and customer appreciation.

How does your mission differ from the other companies in your niche?

In its simplest terms, our mission is to “make someone smile”. There is so much antagonism, conflict, and disagreement in the world today, that sometimes the world can feel a bit hopeless and depressing. With CardSnacks, we try to appeal to the best in people – that so much is gained by showing gratitude and appreciation. Sending a CardSnack always makes a recipient smile and feel valued. So when you multiply those moments by the millions, we’re hopefully helping make the world a materially happier place every day.

❌Most solutions for sending gift cards or gifts to employees and customers are very transactional. They just let you include a simple one line text message like “thanks for your hard work” with your gift, which makes it not particularly personal and not particularly memorable for the recipient.

✅CardSnacks makes it very simple to create memorable and truly personalized messages using voice, video, photos, music, and much more. And with CardSnacks, you don’t have to include a gift – if you just want to send a very personalized thank you card or congratulations card, you can do that too.

Additionally, CardSnacks for Business has unique tools for creating company wide campaigns. So if you want to easily set up a birthday or work anniversary campaign so that every employee gets a card on their birthday or work anniversary, you can set that up in just minutes. Another unique feature of CardSnacks is that it is multiplatform. We have both iOS and Android apps, as well as a web portal, and all are seamlessly integrated.

All of that is a reflection of our core values – sincerity, civility. Just being kind. Making people feel valued and showing gratitude will help any company, so we try to facilitate this for our customers.

Our long-term vision is to be the unrivaled best ecard platform for business and individual consumers. Therefore, we measure success by the number of individuals and businesses that are using the platform to send greeting cards and gift cards to friends, clients, or colleagues.

Who are your typical clients and what problems do they have when they come to you?

Companies of all sizes can benefit from CardSnacks. CardSnacks for Business is used by hundreds of companies in corporate HR, real estate, professional services, sales, education, health care, media, the nonprofit sector, and many more industries to engage customers and colleagues. CardSnacks offers easy tools for managing contacts and campaigns. Plus, as mentioned earlier, companies serious about talent retention use CardSnacks for Business to encourage employee loyalty by marking special occasions. There are dozens of other use cases. CardSnacks is complementary with any CRM strategy.

People in business put a lot of effort into managing relationships – Meeting new people and cultivating those relationships is fundamental to business success, and more importantly employee retention and recognition. They do that because ignoring relationships is often a precursor to failure in business.

CardSnacks is great for keeping in touch with people, starting even very simply with a “nice to meet you” card after a first interaction that shows gratitude. You can also more easily add a financial benefit to recognition and appreciation, since we offer so many gift card options.

Our business clients are typically very CRM minded. They turn to CardSnacks as an enhancement to what they are already focused on getting right.

Prior to CardSnacks, many businesses relied on physical cards to show appreciation and recognize important life events like birthdays and anniversaries. But in the post-COVID world where many employees still work remotely, this becomes more difficult to manage company wide. As one example, a time-honored tradition used to be passing around physical cards in the office for everyone to sign when a co-worker welcomed a baby to the family or lost a loved one.

Now, CardSnacks has the capability to let companies create group greeting cards where anyone can easily add a page to a card from any location. This can be easily tracked in the app, where people can sign a card for an employee right on their cell phone. Once signed, employees can send it right to the recipient or schedule it to deliver at a later date and time, ultimately making employee culture an easy and effortless tradition in the office. Of course another benefit of CardSnacks is that it is much more eco-friendly than sending physical cards

Can you share any success stories where your product made a significant difference for a business dealing with these challenges?

A great example is a recent article explaining how to succeed in real estate written by a longtime customer, Ed Brittingham, a successful Realtor in Michigan. The article was published in Real Estate Agent magazine. Ed cited CardSnacks as the technology he uses to keep in touch and stand out in a crowded, competitive business.

Another great success story is NurseDash an on-demand marketplace for nurses. CEO Weekly ran a nice article describing how they use the CardSnacks for Business platform:

If you had unlimited funds, what improvements would you make?

It isn’t about having the funds, because we have a very scalable platform so we have been able to continuously innovate and roll out features, like AI and group greeting cards, fairly quickly.

Our improvements are really driven by the users. We have an incredibly loyal and vocal user base, and they point us in the direction they feel we should go. We love that community, and we listen to them.