We moved from phone lines to Skype, from hotels to Airbnb, from Taxis to Uber, from physical meetings to Zoom, so the next thing that's being disrupted is the traditional paper business card.
Enter the digital business card once considered a gimmick, it has now been given some serious consideration whether to print a pack of paper cards and be stuck with fixed information or expand the connection opportunity with a more meaningful and up to date contact card.
Thing is digital business cards have been around for a while now so what has changed? What has made it a viable option?
Mobile payments is a key driver, you think they have nothing to do with digital business cards but you would be very wrong. Mobile phones use NFC chips to transmit card details and it is the mass adoption of NFC chips in mobile phones that makes digital business cards more viable as they also utilise NFC chips.
NFC is an amazing technology that has been around for over thirty years. Has been updated over the years to increase memory capacity. The chips don't require any batteries to operate, instead drawing power from the NFC reader in your phone. The added bonus is the NFC is not a power hungry chip so it is enabled by default in most phones and all iPhones since iphone 7.
The other important driver is that more people are using mobile data and have access to the internet on their phones. This is a key factor as digital business cards open a profile page with all the contact information on.
The other factors are the environmental impact of using paper cards most of them end up in the bin. I mean once you save the information on your phone you no longer require the piece of paper it was written on. So the environmental impact is a huge plus factor.
Here is one other point that people only realise when they make the switch to digital business cards. The engagement rate is huge, with papercards you are not getting any feedback on how many times someone is viewing it or if someone has saved your contact data to their phone.
With digital business cards that all changes you have the date on view clicks saved contacts, coupled with the fact that some companies like wave.ws have the auto introduction email built into their Wave Pro+ software which sends welcome emails to both people like a gentle reminder of the meeting. Great for following up on.
Yes, the engagement factor is a huge plus and the number of contacts adding you to their phone's address book also has a huge increase, something that paper cards just can't do and will never be able to do.
https://wave.ws offers a complete package of Cards, Tags and Phone Cards.
