How to Organize Business Card Leads and Contacts for Email Marketing



business card email addressesImprove sales follow-up with business card leads by using a smartphone scan app to electronically organize and integrate contacts into your email marketing software program

Let’s face it, business cards are quickly becoming more and more of an outdated source of information in today’s electronically evolving world. While they are still essential for keeping up with important contacts and capturing new leads, we all know just how easy it is to misplace them while traveling or before getting a chance to enter them into a contact database. Sales follow-up with new leads can often be delayed or never happen at all due to lost or unorganized business card contacts.

Your number one goal with business card leads is growing your contact database for sales follow-up, and integrating leads with your email marketing database is the best way to ensure proper lead follow-up and contact database development. By uploading contact information from business card leads into an email marketing program you have the ability to add them to your email newsletter program, send out special promotions or communications and begin transforming your business leads into new customers.

But getting business card leads and contact information organized and uploaded into an email marketing program is a chore that most small businesses do not have a lot of time to manage on a daily basis. You know what happens. You collect business cards and then they typically pile up until you have time to deal with capturing the information with a business card scanner or – worse yet – entering them manually into your contact database. Even with a business card scanner you have to scan the data from the business card, organize it into a spreadsheet format and go through a list upload process to eventually get them into your email marketing database. The whole process is a headache and wastes valuable time with your sales follow-up.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way you could just snap a picture of a business card right after you get it and have all the information instantly extracted and sent to your email marketing contacts list?

Building Email Marketing Lists with Business Card Scan Apps

Business card scanning apps are one way to capture contact information quickly and easily. But the trick to streamlining the scanning and email marketing list building process is to find a business card scan service that also integrates with your email marketing service.

Two leading services that integrate very well together are Shoeboxed.com (for business card scanning and paperwork organization) and Constant Contact (a leading email marketing service for small businesses).

email marketing business cards

With Shoeboxed.com’s new business card reader app, you simply snap a picture of any business card and Shoeboxed will do the rest. All the data from the card, including the contact’s name, company, phone number, address and email are all extracted and stored in an online database.

And even better, once this information is logged online you can then export it to Constant Contact to build email address lists for your email marketing campaigns. Your online Shoeboxed account easily integrates with an online Constant Contact account – saving valuable time and speeding up your email marketing and sales follow-up process for your business card leads. Shoeboxed also integrates with many other leading marketing list and CRM organizers.

The Shoeboxed Business Card Reader app works with any smart phone, and there are currently free apps for the iPhone, iPad and android operating systems. The process is extremely fast and it really is as simple as taking a picture of a contact’s business card. Shoeboxed will extract the data and even keep an electronic image of the card so you can discard the original and keep your desk free of clutter.

Shoeboxed’s Business Card Reader is an essential tool for any small business owner or marketer who needs to keep up with sales leads but doesn’t have the time to manually enter all of the information into their contact lists. Not only does it save you time, but it speeds up your sales follow-up process and ensures greater accuracy with contact information.

Shoeboxed.com accounts are also very useful for organizing your business receipts for tax time. The business receipt organization process can help you maximize your tax returns by maintaining complete and accurate records throughout the year.

Free Trials to Test Shoeboxed and Constant Contact

The best way to try out these services is simply signing up for free trials.

During the trial periods you can test out the free integration of the Shoeboxed Business Card Reader with Constant Contact’s email marketing service.

Already have an email marketing service? Even if you are signed up with another email marketing service, you can always sign up for a free 60 day trial of Constant Contact to test out the service. If you find you like Constant Contact better, switching email service providers is very easy – simply download or export your contacts and upload them to Constant Contact. Free trials with Constant Contact also include a subscription to their email marketing best–practices newsletter and email campaign coaching tips.



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Editorial Staff

This article was written by SBMarketingTools.com editorial staff.