Why Choose a Mobile App Over Physical Business Card Scanners

A successful business is one that is always striving to win new clients, growing its customer base, and improving its brand image.

One sure-shot way of doing this is by networking. This is why face-face events like trade-shows have gained popularity in recent times. At B2B events, there is always an exchange of contact information, and this is usually done in the form of business cards.

This is because most still feel that this is the fastest and the easiest way to exchange contact details. Business cards are thus here to stay!

What happens to these cards though? A lot of small businesses, and often, even corporations with large teams, end up using paper forms or physical business card scanners to create a database of business card leads — manually inputting contacts from cards into excel sheets or using third party integrations such as Zapier to organize scanned cards in their CRM system.

This of course is time-consuming, prone to errors while typing, often put-off because of the boredom of typing so much of data, and so many of the cards are just forgotten about.

It is a different story now. No longer does one need to manually enter the information. There are business card scanning apps in the market now, like ScanBizCards, one of the best business card scanners, that helps to digitize the paper contacts within a few seconds.

Why are Physical Business Card Scanners Not the Right Choice?

There are various brands of physical business card scanners or digital portable scanners as they are better known, in the market today. These convert the contacts in business cards into the CSV format by scanning them.

Post this, the details can be uploaded in the CRM. So, while it is better than manually entering all information, they come with their own set of challenges. These are:

• Even though these scanners are portable, carrying them around is not easy. They occupy space and are heavy as well. In contrast, having a scanning app on the phone is so much more convenient. All you need to do is to install a business card scanning app, like ScanBizCards, on your smartphone and carry your phone
• Most scanning apps are free. In contrast to this, the physical business card scanners are expensive gadgets to purchase
• When these gadgets become outdated, there is no way to update them as an app can be. These gadgets then need replacement, which is an expensive proposition
• An app does not need maintenance but physical business card scanners do. This is another reason why they tend to burn a hole in the pocket
• These gadgets do not have the facility of 3D scanning — a feature that scanning apps like ScanBizCards does

This is why organizations should use business card scanning apps, instead of physical scanners.

How to Recognise a Great Business Card Scanner?

Every scanner can take a picture of the business card and scan the contact information. However, this is not enough because even after this a lot of time is taken up to manually enter the details onto the computer or copy-pasting it from OCR (optical character recognition) software.

For a scanning app to be labeled a ‘great’ one it needs to reduce the workflow time. This is why scanning apps are becoming popular. With these apps, all that you will need to do is to open the app and take a picture of the business card. The app auto-recognizes the text and uploads it not the phone’s address book or a centralized CRM.

Why is ScanBizCards the Best Solution?

With business card scanning apps fast becoming the need of the hour, there now exists many such apps that are available for both iOS and Android. Here is why ScanBizCards will be the perfect choice for you.

Uses OCR Technology

When you use the ScanBizCards app, your phone’s camera will scan the business card for you. After this, the information gets auto-saved on the phone’s address book.

Can Scan Conference Badges

Not only does this app scan business cards, but it also scans contact details form conference badges as well.

• This becomes ideal for trade shows and other in-person events because there are many who have conference badges as the only way to share their contacts.
• It can also append missing contact information wherever it is available — like email, work phone, company address, and LinkedIn URL.
• Another advantage of using ScanBizCards is that you will not need to integrate with the event organizer’s back-end system. You can just click a picture of the badges and save it or send it for human transcription.

CRM Integrations are Simple

Organizations are nowadays hosting and attending many in-person events so as to generate a high volume of leads. Updating the contacts of the leads manually becomes very time-consuming. However, CRM integration is easy when you use this app. Hence, adding new leads and updating the contacts of the existing ones becomes an easy task.

A Specific Owner is Assigned a Contact

ScanBizCards is the app that you should choose if you are looking for a versatile business card manager. With this app, you can assign a new contact to a specific owner before you export the contact information to a CRM. This is useful when you segment your list of contacts so that you can send each group customized follow-up emails. With this app, you can also add notes for each of your contacts. This will help you to remember important aspects of them and will help you when you are following-up with them.

International Contacts can be Recognised

Over and above English, this app can recognize business cards in more than 20 other languages like German, French, Italian, and Greek. Hence, if you have a lot of business cards that are in a foreign language, you can easily scan them as well with ScanBizCards.

Introductory Emails can be Sent

The moment you add a new contact to your list, you should send him an introductory email. This app will help you to do it. You can also add your photo to the email.

CRM can Store all Information

Maintaining a list of all contacts in a centralized CRM makes it easy to keep track of all prospects and also how far a deal has reached with respect to each of them. ScanBizCards, the best business card scanner apps, comes in handy here as it uploads all contacts directly to a CRM system.

Cost is Low

Both individuals and corporates can use this app as it is not an expensive one. It has the following versions:

• The free business card scanner app
• Payment of $1 for a lifetime for the premium app
• Payment of $100 annually per user for the enterprise license

Unlimited Business Cards can be Scanned

With this app, you can scan an unlimited number of business cards. These can then be added onto the list. It will get added as a new contact or will update an existing contact.

Manual Transcription Service

If the contact information from a business card cannot be automatically recognized then these cars can be submitted for manual transcription. If you opt for the premium version of the app you can avail of two manual transcription versions. For any more, you can purchase them.

Different Systems and Formats are Supported

Contacts can be directly exported to:

• CRM systems like Salesforce, SugarCRM, ConstantContact, and others
• Excel /.csv format
• Email marketing systems, Microsoft Outlook, Exchange, and others

It also supports third-party services such as Evernote. This app is available both as an iPhone business card scanner and an Android business card scanner.

Double-sided Scanning Allowed

Some business cards have information on both sides. With ScanBizCards you can scan both sides easily. Once this is done, you can even forward the contact to others.

Easy Searches

When you use this app, searching becomes an easy task. This is done with the help of a unique 3D view ‘cover flow’.

Scan Email Signatures

Signatures from email accounts can be scanned using ScanBizCards. After scanning, these are converted into email contacts. This is an important feature because there may be email contacts that are not there in your phone’s address book yet.

Summing Up

The right alternative to physical business card scanners is definitely ScanBizCards. Install this app on your phone and you will see how easy and simple the task of creating and maintaining your list of contact becomes.