These days, more and more professionals are opting for contact detail-sharing methods that are more advanced than paper business cards. This shift is simple to explain - an object designed for the needs of an 18th-century professional cannot satisfy the needs of its modern, 21st-century counterpart.
The most common traditional paper business card alternative is the NFC business card, also known as an electronic business card or a smart business card. NFC business cards come in the form of its traditional paper alternative while having all the features you would expect of a modern-day networking gadget. These cards let you continue networking and selling as is traditionally expected yet reap the benefits of our new digital world.
Keep reading if you want to learn more, as this blog post will explain how NFC business cards work, what they can do, how to set one up, and whether using one is the right choice for you.
How do NFC cards work?
NFC business cards are straightforward to use - tap an NFC card against a smartphone, and it opens a profile on that phone. The profile can be configured to open a digital business card (also known as a virtual business card), any social media app, or any website. Even though opening up social media apps and websites can be helpful, the real power behind NFC business cards lies in their digital cards. We'll tell you more about digital business cards in the next section.
The magic that makes NFC business cards work is the NFC chip. Apple pay and credit cards use the same technology, which means that you can trust NFC business cards to be secure and reliable. The card is compatible with practically any smartphone made in the past decade. Still, in the worst-case scenario, there is a QR code on the card that can be scanned (and everyone knows how to scan those these days). It is also essential to highlight that tapping (or scanning) the phone does not require any apps to be installed; it all works out of the box.
What can your digital business card do?
The fact that your business card enters the digital world unlocks many new possibilities. Features include complete personalization, analytics of how people interact with your business card, contact management, integrations with your favorite CRMs, team management, automation through 3rd party No-code tools, interactions with your clients, and more.
Complete personalization arises from digital business cards not forcing you to express yourself on a 3.5" x 2" piece of paper. You can include as much information as you need, and the information is functional and interactive. Additionally, the information can be easily changed manually and automatically (for example, show your latest blog post or display a list of available bookable time slots). Besides the information itself, the way you present it, in terms of layouts, colors, and fonts, can also be fully customized. Digital business cards allow you to show your true self and express yourself in the best way possible.
Digital business cards get displayed as websites, and websites often collect a ton of helpful analytics for their owners (have you heard of google analytics?). As an owner of your digital business card website, you can access that wealth of information that gets collected. You can know what information was viewed and what links were clicked. You can know when your profile was closed. You can know whether your contact details were saved. You can know whether your profile was shared with others. All this information can help you experiment and optimize how you interact with people to maximize the metrics you want to maximize (lead generation, network expansion, etc.).
Every single tap you make creates a new connection that gets recorded in your contacts list, which means your contact/lead collection gets automated. Everyone who attended a networking event knows the pain of saving the details of all the business cards they collected. All the collected information can automatically be exported into your favorite CRM.
Teams can connect a set of cards to expand their functionality. The look of all cards within a team can be managed from a single central point. Team members can share contacts with one another. Analytics can be utilized even better by aggregating the data. NFC cards can enable teams to become much more efficient in networking and sales.
Would you want every new connection you make to be added to your company's newsletter or a drip marketing campaign? This can be trivially done by using No-code tools such as Zapier. NFC card No-code integrations allow you to apply custom automation workflows for every new contact you make.
Finally, the digital card can allow you to interact with your clients in many ways. The digital card can have review forms, a time slot booking system, payment forms, surveys, discount voucher generation, audio snippets, pre-defined pop-ups, and much more. A digital business card is as powerful as any website, yet it takes only a few minutes to set up.
How do you set it up?
The first step in setting yourself up with an NFC business card is picking a company that sells them. Ideally, you would want to have the ability to choose the card material, color, design, and content. Also, you would wish for the software that runs the digital business card to be feature-rich, customizable, and aesthetically pleasing. Tolink is one of the few companies that satisfy all of these requirements.
Once you pick your NFC business card company, you have to choose how your card looks and then order it. Pick your card material, color, and design. Finally, select the details printed on the card, such as name, company, and logo.
Once the card arrives, you activate it by tapping it against your smartphone. The first tap will open a registration form to create your account. After signing up, you can start building your digital business card. Select the information you want to be shown, such as images, names, addresses, companies, emails, phone numbers, and social media accounts. Enable and configure the more advanced features that were described above.
And that's it; your NFC card is ready to be used!
Is an NFC business card the right choice for you?
The amount of utility that these reasonably priced networking gadgets can bring is unparalleled. You would almost always want to use an NFC business card, except in some rare circumstances.
If most of your clients are of elderly age and do not use smartphones, keeping it traditional may be a good choice. However, anyone under retirement age uses a smartphone these days, so these situations rarely arise.
Additionally, if the crowd you are selling to or networking with is very young and tech-savvy, sharing your cards through QR codes may be more appropriate.
In all other cases, using an NFC business card is a no-brainer. You get all the features a professional may need while keeping the traditional form factor of business cards.