Given its limited space, fully conveying your value proposition within a standard email signature can be challenging. Overcome this limitation by making your digital business card accessible from your signature block. Read this article to learn more.
Data suggests that an overwhelming majority (82%) of marketers use email signatures to boost brand awareness. Among these, 48% use email signatures to drive website traffic and 34% to generate leads.
However, one vital question remains: Are you better off with a physical business card platform, or should you opt for a 100% digital business card solution for your networking efforts?
In addition, many professionals turn to digital business cards (e-business cards), adding them to their email signatures as a tactic to bolster email conversion rates.
But why digital business cards, you ask?
Since typical email signatures do not let you showcase your entire value proposition—given the limited space—making your digital business card accessible from your email signature amplifies your email’s overall impact. This influences your recipients to take your desired actions, which strengthens your networking efforts.
Continue reading to learn why you should add a digital business card to your email signature. We’ll also walk you through the two main ways to include an e-business card to your email signature template so it becomes accessible from every email you send.
Email signatures are meant to be concise and compact, accommodating minimal information. A typical signature block only contains basic contact details, such as a name, business logo, a few URLs, and a contact number.
Adding a digital business card to your email signature allows you to expand on these basics and share unlimited amounts of information.
Apart from your name, address, and contact number, your e-business card can house multimedia content such as web URLs pertinent to your niche. These URLs can take your audience to your important landing pages and social channels.
These value-added pieces of information can help position you as a field authority and influence your audience to become a client or customer.
Email signatures are interactive. They allow access to all the information you share via hyperlinks. However, they do not offer the option to save all of this information instantly on a mobile device.
It is reasonable to assume that not all of your recipients will immediately act on the details you place in your email signature. Some may wish to save these details—such as a contact number or physical address—for later use.
By making your e-business card accessible from your email signature, you provide your recipients with the option to instantly save your essential information on their mobile devices.
Upon saving your digital business card in a VCF (Virtual Contact File) format, all its details—including your photo, contact numbers, emails, and web URLs—become readily available as a contact list entry.
What’s convenient about the VCF (Virtual Contact File) format is that it is readable across all devices. Your recipients can save your business card details regardless if they use a smartphone, tablet, or PC.
Good to know: Not only can a digital business card let your clients instantly save your contact details. It also enables them to share their information with you in real-time—directly via your card.
This is because your card enables two-way contact sharing, i.e., you and your client can share contact details with each other—via the same e-business card.
Your client can submit their details through a form on your card. This form submission becomes a lead entry in your digital address book, serving as a list of all your collected leads. You can export this list of leads directly to Salesforce or 700+ other CRMs via Zapier.
Bonus tip: NFCCARD lets you configure an automatic prompt for your recipient to download your e-business card details the moment they access it from your email signature.
Activate this feature by toggling on “Directly Download” under the Additional settings tab as you create a digital business card.
Let’s look at a scenario:
Suppose you’re using an email signature to generate leads for your professional practice. Your email signature might present a contact number, an address, or a link to an official website. These details might entice a potential lead to get in touch with you.
However, as a professional, there is a likelihood you are also using multiple channels to promote your practice and increase your influence. For instance, you might actively use YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn to publish value-adding content.
Now, as mentioned, email signatures are meant to be concise. Using it to showcase too many details can beat its purpose. That said, it’s unlikely you can use it alone to drive traffic to your other engagement channels.
Overcome this limitation by linking your digital business card to your email signature. Upon access via a click or a scan, your audience can view all your relevant online destinations in your e-business card–regardless if they are website pages, social media profiles, or instant messenger handles.
Further reading: How to create a digital business card with social media links
Let’s look at a scenario:
Adding a digital business card to your email signature is easy once you have the card ready. But in case you don’t have one:
The most efficient way to create an e-business card is via a specialized digital business card solution. Using a dedicated platform, you can access a full range of features that make e-business card creation and distribution convenient and—most importantly—ROI-driven.
You can learn more about e-business card creation by referring to our easy-to-implement guide on how to create a digital business card.
Once you create a digital business card, you can add it to your email signature in two ways: as a QR Code or a hyperlinked text.
1.Add your digital business card to your email signature as a QR Code
2.Add your digital business card to your email signature as a hyperlink
To help you get started, here are five email signature templates with digital business cards:
A digital business card adds a powerful actionable element to your email signature but is merely the first step of converting them into customers. You must ensure your e-business card can convince your audience to take the desired actions.
So how do you create digital business cards that garner results? By choosing the best digital business card solution. In addition to providing the functionalities you need to efficiently create, customize, and distribute professional e-business cards, NFCCARD offers several advanced capabilities, including:
Digital business card sharing via Apple Wallet or Google Wallet for contactless networking
Bulk creation and automation to diminish the time to generate e-business cards
Industry-leading security—GDPR and SOC 2 Type II compliance and other enterprise-grade security measures for e-business cards
Robust team-level analytics and tracking
All of these functionalities are accessible without you ever needing to download an app.
To learn more about the above capabilties, refer to our article on the 5 features that make NFCCARD the best digital business card solution available today.
Here is an easy-to-implement guide on creating an e-business card using NFCCARD’s digital business card solution:
1. Log in to your NFCCARD account, click Create, and choose Digital Business Card.
2. Choose a digital business card layout.
3. Fill in all the fields in your profile information.
4. Design your digital business card to match your branding.
5. Include all your contact details.
6. Add your social media links to your e-business card.
7. Customize and download your digital business card.
8. Add your digital business card to your email signature as a QR Code or a hyperlink.
Email signatures are compact by nature. They only showcase essential details, such as a name, physical address, and contact number. For this reason, they seldom convey your whole value proposition. Including a digital business card in your email signature allows you to provide more information about yourself and your business.
Here is how you can add a digital business card to your Gmail signature block:
1. Sign in to your Gmail account.
2. Click the gear icon in the upper-right corner to access the Settings menu.
3. Click See all settings.
4. In the General tab, scroll down into the Signature section.
5. Click +Create New and assign a name to your new email signature template.
6. Write your email signature in the block provided.
7. Attach your digital business card as a QR Code or hyperlinked text.
8. Scroll down to the bottom and click Save Changes.
Add a digital business card to your email signature in Outlook by following these steps:
1. Open the Outlook app and sign in.
2. Access the File menu and choose Options.
3. On the Options window, choose Mail in the side menu, then click Signatures.
4. In the Email Signature tab, click New and assign a name for your email signature template.
5. Select the name of the email signature you created under Select signature to edit.
6. Design your email signature under the Edit signature section.
7. Add your digital business card as a QR Code or hyperlinked text.
8. Click OK to save your signature template.
