Paper business cards have been around for four centuries (since the 17th century). It has survived for such a long time and is still relevant today. Many businesses are still using it for the exchange of their organization or business contact information. But it’s time to transform to the digital business card.
Paper business cards are great and have withstood the test of time because they’re cheap and have a meaningful purpose for every business – being a convenient way to share business contact information. A business card legitimizes who you are, conveys the services you offer, and provides a means for customers and business partners to remember you after a first meeting while providing contact information.
With its legacy in connecting your business with prospective customers and partners, a paper business card has both the advantages and disadvantages. Before we enter into the digital way of connecting people with business cards, let’s have a strong understanding of how paper business cards have withstood the test of time (spanning for four decades) overcoming the revolutions and seemingly coming to its end within a couple or decade of years to come.
Advantages:
When you’re at a networking meeting and meet partners or customers, paper business cards are an excellent way to grab their attention, exposing your brand, and make great first impressions. It’s a great way to do networking face-to-face with great people.
It helps you establish a strong, meaningful personal connections/relationships with people you meet
With its span of four centuries in connecting and networking businesses or organizations to customers or prospects, they are relatively inexpensive to produce and not so bulky to carry around.
Well, but it also have some disadvantages.
Business change from time to time. Your phone number, email address, or any other valuable contact information can change at any given time. This means you stand a chance to lose your previously connected customers or people as you must reprint an entirely new set of cards.
The cost for designing this type of business card needs a service of a professional graphic designer. This costs you money.
Sharing cards at the right time – sometimes being in a networking meetup or meet a person who needs a business card, you may realize that you forget to carry or you’ve run out of the cards you carried. This makes you lose a lot of prospects who may have been of value to your business.
And the saddest part – miss-management of paper cards. More than 85% of paper business cards handed out to target prospects will be thrown out in less than a week or misplaced making it irrelevant. People do forget about it after sometime and may need to research again about your business or go to another business if your services or products didn’t fully satisfy their intent.
With the advancement in technology revolutions, many organizations and businesses are devising the digital way of networking and connecting with their prospects. Be it within the organization or a customer whom you want to get in touch with.
The internet has become the awakening part of connecting businesses to people or customers. Nearly everything is done “online” – be it from communication, learning, shopping etc. Email is an example of the internet communication tool which has stood to affirm the way online communication is relevant to our era.
Shopping and online reviews are also the first things we research before engaging with some businesses. If you want to book for a hotel offering pizza in your location or maybe you’re a tourist looking for a place to dine, online trip advisor and other review sites help you learn about some of the hotels available near you and how earlier customers have experience or relations with them. You learn about their service and conclude if it’s worth your needs.
Networking involves making great first impressions and exposing your brand. Technology has created an impact on how we interact and engage with people; both online and in-person. A digital business card and social platforms provide an excellent way of connecting with people. It’s most comfortable and ideal as we enter into the “always online” era of global technology.
CardInbox app: A Smarter Way to digitally Share digital Business Card
CardInbox is a digital business card app that helps people (businesses, organization or institutions) quickly share their contact information and follow-up with people. It’s a digital business card alternative to paper business cards bundle with exclusive digital advantages for efficiency and better customer-business relations – all for free.
CardInbox enables you to create a lifelong relationship out of every business card exchange. It creates a growing value for you by allowing you to exchange, save and use contact information seamlessly. By installing and using it in your business, your digital business card gets an added layer of usability that a normal paper card can’t provide.
How CardInbox Works
Once you install the app, you’re introduced into the space of adding your business card to the app. you click images of your personal business card and the app does the rest for you. The guys behind CardInbox setup a digital equivalent business card for you on CardInbox where you can instantly share your new card via in-App features like “One Time Secret Code or QR Code”. And if you're one of those people who love living in the past, you can even send it as a traditional vCard! What's cool is that if your work details change, simply upload the new business card and the app updates it and notify all users with your new card information. This experience helps create long-term business relationships out of business card exchanges.
Some great features
CardInbox has a "Public Profiles" section where it let users add some basic information and allows you to correctly identify your friends or acquaintances. You can easily search for these "Public Profiles" and directly request their business cards anytime you want with ease.
You can also control who has access to your business card with one click “Approvals”.
"Connections" help you understand with whom you had exchanged your business card as well as how and when. When your business card is updated, the app automatically update all your "Connections" with the latest information.
Moreover, you can directly make calls, send SMS, book an Uber to visit the address mentioned in the business card etc. You can even save received cards to your phone book thus making connections or networking easy for you.
That’s it. As simple as it should be but with effective great benefits. Below is a list of some of the benefits your business get by using CardInbox in your business.
At its core, CardInbox is free. It’s absolutely free but with professional and exclusive features. Surely you deserve a try of this app.
Seamless business management. Always have your digital business card with you and never worry about running out of them. Instantly share it anywhere, anytime. The platform provides you with a cloud service where you can easily store and organize all your business cards with ease of search.
Go green. No need to spend money on printing paper business cards. Save a tree by going paperless. Seriously. Save the planet by promoting the global green initiative program!
Effective information consumption. Unlike the paper business card, the information on the digital business card is made clickable for you to connect with prospects using their phone numbers, email or address. This information can also be exported and integrated into other business tools you have in your business.
Get ease and peace of mind in organizing and utilizing digital business cards. Create more opportunities by changing the way you interact with digital business card and derive more value from them. Scan your business card and digitalize them with CardInbox android and iPhone app for free. Invite people to connect with you on CardInbox for a seamless experience of network connection.

Author's Bio: 

aper business cards have been around for four centuries (since the 17th century). It has survived for such a long time and is still relevant today. Many businesses are still using it for the exchange of their organization or business contact information. But it’s time to transform to the digital business card.