A business card scanner is a tool that should be on the desk of every sales person and executive who gathers business cards on a regular basis. Contrary to popular belief, the use of business cards is far from a dead science.  In fact, in a age of spam, spoofing, phishing and fraud, a good business card is pretty much the gold standard for contact information for businesses. Face to face interaction in business is vital and helps to build and solidify prospect and customer relationships.  While we are bombarded with digital messaging in the form of chat, social, email and SMS, a good old fashioned handshake and exchange of business cards is not just quaint, it’s THE GOLD STANDARD of relationship building.

With that said, a business card as a physical document needs to be converted into a digital contact record.   This is where business card scanners like the ones offered by AMBIR come into play.  A business card scanner can be a desktop scanner that scans everything from documents to IDs to business cards or you can have scanners that are portable (wand scanners) that can be brought with you to events, trade shows..etc and can scan documents and cards on the go.  Regardless of configuration, the business card scanner will intake a physical card and use OCR (optical character recognition) technology to scan and transform the card into a digital contact record, which can then be Imported into a variety of applications such as CRM, email marketing and more.

Why a business card scanner is important for businesses?

Developing Email Marketing Lists

Developing a list of contacts, whether it’s for customers or prospects is a vital step in building and scaling your business for a number of reasons.  Firstly, harvesting business cards from prospects allows you to create email marketing communications to stay in front of an top of mind with prospects who have engaged with you at some level.

A business card scanner like AMBIR’s PS667 is a valuable tool that more than pays for itself in convenience.  Let’s say you’re a small retail business and you run a fishbowl promotion where people drop a business card to win some regular spiff, like a gift card or coupon.  Once a day an employee can easily scan the business cards into apps like Outlook, Salesforce or Google Contacts or even export csv of contacts to them import into email marketing apps like MailChimp or ConstantContact.

Once you have your business cards in a tool like that you can begin to message offers, newsletters and more.  Staying in front of prospects in a meaningful way will help grow your business without the need to buy expensive email lists that rarely work and often violate CAN SPAM

Trade Show and Events

If you’re a business that engages in trade shows, networking events or similar, there is a possibility that you will gather a relatively large number of business cards that need to be input into a system such as email marketing or CRM.  All too often business cards sit on a desk gathering dust as people neglect the cumbersome process of entering in these contacts manually.  A business card scanner will make short work of this process and encourage team members to input these valuable contacts in a timely manner so that you can begin follow up through email, SMS or phone calls.

Customer Information

If you interact with customers face to face, the act of exchanging business cards makes it easy to capture customer information that can later be added to customer systems through scanning and subsequent csv import.  Customer communications, when done well, improve CX (customer experience).

Administrative Tasks

Sales personnel and executives who are in the field interacting with  prospects, partners and customers are often gathering a large number of business cards.  Often these cards either sit on the desk languishing or must be manually entered by administrative personnel.  Using business card scanners as part of an established process of entering cards will ensure the contacts go into the right systems for use in marketing or general communications.

Summary

Business card scanners are relatively low-cost solutions that retail for under $200 for simple units to around $500 for multi-function combination scanners (Documents, IDs and Business Cards).  They save huge amounts of time and ensure that valuable contacts are being input and used properly.  In the case of trade shows, companies spend tens of thousands of dollars on events so making sure every contact is captured plays a vital role in achieving an ROI on events.

About AMBIR

AMBIR is a manufacturer of digital capture solutions for businesses and consumers.  Headquartered in Chicago, IL and founded over 25 years ago on the premise of creating the highest quality hardware backed by hands-on support.  AMBIR provides a variety of document and card scanners, business card scanners, eSignature pads and barcode scanners for various industries including healthcare, financial services, legal and more.  We are known for being a hands-on organization who supports its clients with an internal team of dedicated professionals who know their clients by name.  AMBIR is considered a market leading solution in a number of industries including healthcare, financial services and small business.