Business Card Scanning

Business cards are a great way to get to know people who are relevant to you quickly and easily. You could meet people at networking events, dinners and other places who could become either useful as service providers or potentially as customers. But after a while these cards start to mount up and you don’t really know what to do with them so much, plus you lose track of people who you wanted to keep in touch with.

However these cards are possibly one of the best marketing tools available to this day, especially when you digitise them. These days it’s possible to digitise and capture the information from business cards through business card scanning and card capture.

Many companies, mainly companies that specialise in document scanning offer this as a service and promise to be able to extract names, phone numbers, email address and work addresses, some of the most important details from a marketing perspective, and add them into a database or spreadsheet for you to use in the future.

Many businesses these days such as restaurants are using business cards and business card scanning as an unusual marketing technique. They will put a pot on their counter with a note that reads that if you leave your business card here you can win something. This is a great idea as this is quite literally someone giving you permission to use the details on their card. This is then used to generate targeted email campaigns or mail campaigns at customers that are targeted exclusively to their business type; current customers which can become recurring customers.

Once you have a number of cards you simply send them to the business card scanning company to be scanned and for the data to be captured. When this is done they will send you back something like an Excel spreadsheet containing names, numbers, email addresses and any other relevant details. These details can then be used for mailing lists, email campaign lists or anything else that you can think of.

Business card scanning and capture companies usually scan in the cards at 300DPI in colour to ensure quality and most accurate capture when the images themselves are run through the data extraction software which is where the real magic happens. The software is normally able to extract details and then add them into applicable categories. For example if the software sees an ‘@’ symbol this will be associated as an email address and will be put into the applicable category.

It is also not usually necessary to capture all data on a card and specific information can be gathered such as if you only require an email address or telephone number and name.

These cards hold the most important information for getting in contact with people and getting to know them better and whether this is via the phone, through email or through the post, this is an excellent tool for anyone who wants to boost their marketing base and potentially their client base additionally.