You're the global sales lead at an enterprise company. So, as part of your role, you attend industry events to connect with peers and possible business partners.
During one of such events, you strike a conversation with a potential prospect. And just before you part ways, you decide to share your contact details with them. So you reach into your pocket for your company business card. But unfortunately, the one you have is outdated.
You then remember that you ran out of the current business card earlier in the week but forgot to restock. And since the prospect is waiting, you fumble around trying to call out your contact details, ruining the business networking opportunity in the process.
Now, this experience is common with enterprise businesses still relying on traditional business cards. Imagine how many opportunities and potential revenue such businesses have lost. That’s the reason why an alternative to paper business cards is necessary.
And what's this alternative?
Digital business cards.
Digital business cards make it easy for business professionals to network on-the-go and impact their bottom line.
So today, I'll show you how digital business cards benefit your enterprise. I'll also reveal how Blinq, a digital business card tool for enterprises, can help your organization manage its professional identity.
But first-
What Are Enterprise Digital Business Cards?
Digital business cards for enterprise’s are the online version of paper business cards. Also called virtual business cards, e-business cards, or smart business cards, they offer many advantages over traditional paper business cards. Examples include cost savings, portability, and environmental friendliness.
Unlike their traditional counterparts, digital business cards do not restrict the amount of information you can share. You have more real estate to add your company website, physical address, accreditations/awards, social media accounts, and even specific calls to action.
Blinq’s Enterprise digital business card platform allows large organizations to create and distribute digital business cards to thousands of employees. They include additional security and user management features to ensure the responsible use of company digital business cards.
How Do Enterprise Digital Business Cards Work?
Enterprise digital business cards are powerful lead generation, lead capture, and networking tools.
They enable your teams to share company information and collect customer data in an innovative, convenient way.
Potential customers and partners receive your company information by scanning your QR code with their phones.
After that, they can immediately share their details with your team by completing a quick online form as seen below:
This way, your teams can obtain contact details of potential leads without handing out and collecting paper cards that pile up and get outdated quickly.
Thanks to their slick outlook, digital business cards help employees make a memorable impression and stand out when networking online or in person.
📚Related➡ Digital business cards: What are they and why are they important?
Despite the many advantages of digital business cards, some businesses still prefer to use physical business cards for various reasons.
Thankfully, Blinq's NFC cards offer an innovative way for businesses to enjoy the benefits of digital business cards while wielding a physical card. Best of both worlds!
NFC Cards v Digital Business Cards: What Is the Difference?
It's common for companies to confuse digital business cards with NFC cards. In fact, we've seen it happen a lot with customers. The obvious reason is that both allow you to share who you are with anyone wherever you go. However, they have some important differences.
- Digital business cards are the virtual cards you keep on your phone, tablet, or laptop. They have a QR code that recipients can scan to receive your information.
- On the other hand, an NFC card is a physical tappable card you can carry around. It's embedded with a chip connected to your digital business card account. To receive your information, the recipient has to tap your NFC card on their smartphone.
NFC cards eliminate the need to print multiple cards and reprint them every time company or employee information changes. Since they connect to a live digital business card profile, you can edit your information anytime, and your new contacts will receive the updated information whenever they tap your card.
📚Related➡ How to create a Blinq NFC business card for networking
Other Ways to Share Your Enterprise Digital Business Card
Apart from asking customers to scan an NFC card or the QR code on their phones, employees can share their digital business cards in a few other ways.
- By text, web links, or emails
- Via QR codes on apple watches
- Smartphone widgets
- Add your QR code to posters, stickers, t-shirts, and other marketing materials.
What Are the Benefits of Digital Business Cards for Enterprises?
1. Better and Consistent Branding
Digital business cards allow you to create team card templates with your preferred information fields and brand materials. This ensures consistency across your teams. With templates, you can stay in control of the information being shared on every business card while ensuring they're always up to date.
2. Save on Card Printing Costs
According to CreditDonkey, it costs an average of $194 for companies to design and print one pack of paper business cards. And that depends on the design, quality, and card company. Now imagine printing thousands of cards for different offices and employees. The cost can quickly add up.
On the flip side, enterprise digital business card platforms allow you to generate and share an unlimited amount of digital business cards without spending on design and printing.
Moreso, when you change company information or make a new hire, there's no need to redistribute your card or worry about outdated information being in circulation.
Digital business cards are always live. So every change you make updates across all recipient devices, keeping your information up to date.
3. Improve Communication
Digital business cards encourage future contact. Sales reps and marketers no longer have to worry about customers and partners losing their information because their contact details are saved on the recipient's phone. Now, customers can reach out long after they receive your details. Plus, the ability to customize employee business cards with their headshots helps customers connect a face to their point of contact. Thus, increasing credibility and authenticity and improving customer-client relationships.
4. Track Networking Efforts and Measure ROI
No more blind networking. Gain insights into how people interact with your business cards, so you know where and how to further connections. You can also see which employees are performing better by tracking the number of card scans. This way, you can optimize your networking efforts and spend.
5. Go contactless. Go green
Statistics show that about 2 million trees are used to manufacture paper business cards every year. Plus, Adobe reports that 88% of all the business cards your teams hand out get trashed in less than a week. This report was far back in 2016, so imagine how high those numbers would be in this digitally charged age.
Digital business cards, on the other hand, help companies cut their carbon footprint and behave in a sustainable way. By adopting sustainable business cards, you help keep more trees in the ground and make the planet safer.
👀Did you know?➡ You can add and delete users and lock information fields on and off your Blinq enterprise digital business cards. Get in touch for a demo
Enterprise Use Cases for Digital Business Cards
Now you've seen how digital business cards can benefit your organization. It's time to share ways your enterprise can use Blinq enterprise digital business cards.
1. Set up Team Card Templates and Manage Employee Access
Enterprises usually have several offices, with thousands of employees needing business cards every year.
So you'll agree that the larger your organization, the harder it is to monitor how employees represent your brand. Also, controlling company information in circulation can become difficult as employees come and go.
But with Blinq, you can say goodbye to these concerns.
Our digital business card solution is designed to help companies maintain brand consistency. Hence, our platform comes with administrative controls. These controls allow you to set team templates with your brand colors and preferred company information. You can create unlimited templates for different departments, offices, and teams. These templates then form the foundation to create your team's digital business cards.
One of the best aspects of team templates is you can prevent employees from overriding specific functions when creating their cards. Also, locking functions can prevent them from adding inappropriate information like their personal social media.
Our Growth Operations Lead, Harrison Coull, shares why enterprise customers love this feature.
"Admins love the ability to lock features on the card, so there is symmetry across the team. They also love the ability to lock features off the card, preventing anyone adding personal links that aren't appropriate for work, like personal social media accounts" - Harrison Coull.
Now, every team template you create on Blinq is live. This means whenever you edit a template, all the employee cards using that template will update in real-time to reflect the current information.
💡[Embed]➡How to set up Blinq templates for Teams
As an admin, you can add and delete users from your dashboard. And when employees leave, you're assured of the safety of your information because you can effortlessly cancel their card and assign it to a new user. This gives you more security and control over the information being shared with your enterprise digital business card.
As our Growth Operations Manager said:
"We hear from team admins that the ability to take charge, create, modify, and update team cards alleviates a lot of upkeep time for the whole team and ensures consistency of branding and information across all cards."
- Sam Barnes, Growth Operations Manager.
2. Automate Lead Capture With Powerful CRM Integration
This probably sounds familiar:
Your customer-facing teams attend networking events. They distribute hundreds or thousands of business cards and gather a similar number in return.
Then, they spend hours keying in the contact details from those paper cards into your CRM system or an excel spreadsheet.
How many hours of admin work do you think that costs you yearly?
Not to mention that the boring, tedious task of manually entering information is prone to errors.
So, what is the better way to capture customer information?
You guessed right—Blinq's enterprise digital business cards.
When potential leads share their information after scanning your QR code, their details are immediately added to your admin dashboard.
You'll see their contact information, the employees they interacted with, and the day they scanned your company card. From there, you can easily export contacts to your CRM for nurturing.
Blinq automatically integrates with Hubspot and Salesforce. And we can connect to thousands of other CRM through Zapier.
To save your team some time, connect Blinq to your CRM to automatically sync and export your contacts every time they're updated.
📚Related➡How to export Blinq contacts to a CRM
"Teams, especially sales and procurement teams, love that their new contacts pull through automatically and smoothly to their CRM connections without them needing to interfere at all!"
- Travis James, Growth Operations Manager
3. Automate Card Creation For Teams by Linking With Your HR Directory
Linking your Blinq digital business card account to an active directory like Azure AD streamlines creating, updating, and distributing team cards in bulk.
When new hires join your team and the HR directory updates, a new digital business card can automatically be generated. Promotions can also be applied to employee business cards in real-time. No need to spend resources redesigning, reprinting, and distributing cards every time there's an internal company change.
📚Related➡ SCIM provisioning of users with Azure AD
4. Equip Your Customer-Facing Teams to Network at Scale
Technology has changed business networking in many ways. With customers relying more on software, adopting innovative methods shows you're a forward-thinking company.
Digital business cards set you apart from the competition and help your company network in a modern and effective way.
With Blinq, your teams will never worry about forgetting their cards or running out when it's most important. That's because their business cards are always with them. In their phones, smartwatches, laptops, and tablets.
New contacts need not have the Blinq app to receive your company information. They can quickly scan your QR code or tap your NFC card to download your details into their phone.
During in-person networking events or marketing campaigns, you can download your QR code as an image and add it to t-shirts, billboards, and other marketing materials. This will make distributing company information 10X easier. Plus, your QR code is static. So even when you update company information, it stays the same.
The thought of losing customer information or forgetting who you had conversations with also becomes a thing of the past. Now your teams can follow up easily and build better connections with leads.
5. Secure Your Data
Digital business cards contain your employee's personal and professional information. So, keeping this data safe is a priority.
Here at Blinq, we understand the importance of data privacy and security. So, we guarantee the safety of your information. We encrypt your data in transit and at rest and follow industry best practices to ensure a security-first approach in our software development lifecycle.
We'll never sell your data. We use reputable third-party security vendors to monitor and manage security controls to meet SOC2 standards. And we review all vendors to ensure they meet the same security requirements we apply ourselves to.
💡Convinced it's time to switch from paper to digital business cards? Book a demo here
How Enterprises Onboard With Blinq’s Enterprise Digital Business Cards
Every day, thousands of enterprises trust Blinq to help them manage their professional identity and network in an easy, secure way. You can be one of them too.
Source: GetApp
We have the resources and infrastructure to deliver secure and functional digital business cards that work flawlessly across several teams and thousands of users.
Our supportive, capable team will work with you to set up your account and guide your company through a personalized onboarding process.
Here's what that process looks like
- Contact us for a demo. We'll show you the core features and capabilities of our enterprise digital business card platform. During the demo, we'll discuss your company's needs, goals, and the tech stack that needs to integrate with Blinq.
- If you decide to take us for a spin, we'll give you a 30-day free trial to test-run Blinq. No commitments required. We want to show you how we can help you network smarter, save resources and streamline business processes with Blinq.
- Once you're ready to roll out Blinq to the rest of your company, we'll work with you to set up team templates, upload individual business cards and distribute them to team members. We'll also help team members get familiar with the product. You can rest assured you'll always have our support.
- Share, track, and optimize. We won't leave you after you're set up. Our team will continue to support your organization to ensure everyone adjusts properly to digital business cards. We'll provide marketing collateral to enable you track and optimize your business cards for maximum benefits.
Empower Your Enterprise With Digital Business Cards
Ready to switch from paper business cards to a more sustainable and innovative option?
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