Contribute to the path of sustainability by creating yourself a paperless Business Card
A business card is a widely used tangible item that is a must-have in a formal introduction. You have a bunch of cards with you, ready to distribute among potential partners of your business in the future. As a matter of fact, it is somewhat an effortless method of sharing your contact details with someone, which makes it straightforward for the suits and dresses in sales and marketing.
It is 2020. Do people still use Business cards? Is there still relevancy in sharing tangible business cards to the people you meet? According to statistics, 88% of the business cards given are thrown away within a week. 63% of the business cards are thrown away because people do not need the service, mainly since the recipient does not want the service immediately. However, it is noted that your business card has a higher chance of sticking around if the design and the print of it look luxurious. It makes the card outstanding among the rest.
If you are mainly into getting to know people to find leads, keeping a good set of business cards is essential. However, a business card alone would not do the major part of your job. If your priority is not giving out business cards to the people you meet, there is less chance that your business cards are even on your hands to distribute in the first place. It is observed that most people print our business cards paying thousands of dollars for the design as well as for prints, just to be thrown away most probably.
How does this affect the sustainability of the world and the company you work for? According to the Global Forest Reserve Assessment, roughly 80000 to 160000 trees are cut every day, mostly to make paper. Apart from contributing to a hotter planet by deforestation, paper manufacturing also contributes to air pollution and water pollution in massive numbers. Contributing to a sustainable future should start from ourselves. There is no use of wasting paper on business cards if almost 9 out of 10 business cards are thrown away. Reducing the budget allowing for the prints of business cards and going ahead with intuitive paperless solutions can drive your business towards a sustainable world, at lease by a little.
A Simple Alternative
QR! Yes, the pure alternative was hanging around the world for some time. The uses of QR has increased since the beginning of it. The meaning of QR, “Quick Response,” itself defines why it has been a successful approach for sharing things quickly. Base usage of QR is encoding text into a sharable image format. This has expanded to sharing URL links, Phone numbers, Short messages, and, most importantly, storing full contact details that can be shared with someone in an instant.
Almost all of the smartphone devices have a camera that natively supports reading QR codes instantly. The use of deep links in different smartphone operating systems has revolutionized reading the contacts in QR codes and automatically load it into the list of contacts in the device.
How to make one for yourself?
Multiple online tools on the internet give you the luxury of making your own contact QR Code. The QR Code Generator, QR Code Monkey, and QR Generator are some of the leading service providers that allow you to convert your details to a QR image. To achieve the best results, you have to make sure that you are creating a ‘contact’ and not a URL or a plain text. The contact QR codes decode the image to a vCF (vCard) format, which can be open by the smartphone instantly.
The above is how you fill in your contact details to get the following QR code. Go on, pop up your camera, and see how it loads your contact directly to the contact creation page of your phone.
The Next Steps
As much as it is easier to carry a QR image in your phone digitally, rather than carrying a bunch of physical cardboards that has the potential to be thrown away, it can be harder to locate the image itself on your phone. If you are a bit of a technical person, you can make use of HTML, Javascript, and a bit of CSS to develop your own Progressive Web App with your QR code on display, which can easily be located and share among your partners. The following is a simple demonstration of a web app with some style that can come in handy as an alternative to a physical card.
Business cards are critical in doing new businesses. It is a better practice to invent alternatives to non-sustainable methods that can be utilized by simple existing techniques.
