Visiting cards, whether paper or digital, are enablers of any business or professional’s growth over time. However, the role of paper cards is diminishing in today’s highly digitalized post-pandemic world where networking and building connections have gone virtual. A digital card is now a necessity.

Environmental impact

Needless to mention that the paper visiting cards are hazardous to the environment and contribute significantly to the earth’s carbon footprint. According to research, 7.2 million trees are cut every year for business cards, around 90% of which are discarded within the 1^st week.

Paper visiting cards contain limited and static information. Once printed, you cannot make updates or changes to these cards. When someone leaves the organization or changes industries, designations, or contact information, paper visiting cards become obsolete and useless. Digital visiting cards help reduce the individual carbon footprint by being completely paperless, ensuring no wastage or pollution.

Advantages of Digital Business Cards

Besides being environment friendly, digital or virtual business cards have many other advantages.

Easy to design, edit, and share

A digital or virtual visiting card is easy to design using pre-existing templated, and can be edited anytime a change needs to be done. Moreover, the exchange of digital business cards is contactless. You can exchange cards even without physically meeting people. This feature of a digital visiting card is particularly relevant today when most business meetings are happening remotely.

Saves time & money

On average, an organization spends INR 5000 per employee per year for printing their visiting cards. Digital business cards are extremely cost-efficient and help save significantly on designing & printing costs. Additionally, managing and storing paper visiting cards consumes a large amount of time when done manually. A digital visiting card can be saved, stored and accessed instantly, without wasting any time on repetitive manual processes.

Convenient storage & organizer

Paper business cards are extremely complicated to store & organize. There are multiple complexities associated with a physical cardholder & manual storage; the major ones being low shelf life and the inability to access the right contact at the right time. Digital visiting cards are stored on cloud microservices, ensuring there is no loss or damage of data in the long term. They also come with customized tags that allow large sets of data to be neatly segmented for instant access.

Simplified contact management

Consider a situation where you end up collecting hundreds of business cards over a period from your contacts or people you meet for business – how do you organize and store their contact information? How do you get the required details in times of need? All this may not be possible with paper business cards. However, if contact information is digitally stored, it will simplify contact management. It can make it easier for you to do follow-ups with your contacts. Also, digital cards can make it easier for you to transfer the information contained in digital business cards to other systems like CRM.

Complete, updated information

A digital visiting card contains more information than just contact details. You can add your social profiles, blogs, resumes, company website and more on an e-card. In fact, you can use the digital visiting card as a marketing tool – updating it with new information every time you launch a new product, service, or campaign!

To sum up, it’s clear that a digital or virtual visiting card is not just eco-friendly but also cost and time-effective An e-card offers improved convenience and intelligent tools for exchanging and storing contact information and networking seamlessly, thus making it a non-negotiable asset for any professional or business.