Why You Should Never Carry a Business Card (and What To Do Instead): Part 1

Business cards are one of the absolute staples of entrepreneurship. Just about everyone in business keeps a supply with them at all times and hands them out at every opportunity. So people are really surprised that I almost never carry business cards with me, and even more surprised that I do this on purpose.

If you give someone your card, you’re counting on them to stay in touch with you. Even if they’re interested, people forget, get busy, or will lose your card. It’s FAR more important for you to take control and stay in touch with them.

If someone asks for your card, they might be interested in your product or service… or they might be feigning interest and are looking for a polite way to transition to conversation.

Despite the fact that I don’t carry business cards, I love it when people ask me if I have a business card with me, because it gives me the perfect opportunity to use the strategy and campaign that I’m going to share with you today.

Here’s the strategy:

Let’s say you’re at a social event and you meet someone, talk a little business, and they say, “That sounds really great. Do you have a card?”

You then say, “Sorry, I don’t have one with me, but if you give me your email address, I’ll send you my contact info.” Of course they’ll agree to this.

You pull out your phone and click an icon on your screen that takes you to an Infusionsoft web form. You say, “Can you spell your name and email address for me?” This gives you a chance to get their name again if you forgot.

Of course, they think you’re just composing an email… but then they get intrigued when you tab to the next field on the form, press the little microphone button on your keyboard, and speak your opening sentence or two into a custom field. You say, “It was great seeing you at Muffy’s birthday party. Let me know how things turn out with Joe’s school project.”

Then you select a checkbox or two on the form, make a selection on a radio button, and click the submit button. Now you’re putting Infusionsoft to work because here’s what happens next:

They get an immediate, PERSONAL email from you. The message has a subject line of “great to see you…” NOT “great to meet you” because you might use this with someone you met long ago. It’s all lower case to look like it came from a person, not a machine.

After a standard salutation, the message contains the greeting that you spoke into your phone, followed by your contact info, then a link to one of your lead magnets. Here’s what it would look like:

Hey Joe,

It was great seeing you at Muffy’s birthday party.  Let me
know how things turn out with Joe’s school project.
Here’s my contact info if you want to reach me:
Your Name
123 Main Street
City, State, Zip
(123) 456-7890
you@yourdomain.com
By the way, here’s a link to a super-helpful PDF that will
help you solve your issue with X.
http://yourcompany.com/super-helpful-thing
I think you’ll find it really valuable – especially tips #3
which will help you save about 33% and #5 which points out
a mistake that almost everyone makes when they do X.
All the best,
Your Name

The beauty of this is that you were able to choose exactly the right “super helpful thing” to send them by choosing from a list of options on your own web form.

So as you might guess, in the campaign set up a simple web form to help you collect information about the contact right when you’re having the conversation. At a minimum you want to collect their name and email, and have a radio snippet to choose which lead magnet to send them.

The web form leads through a decision diamond to MULTIPLE sequences – one for each of your main lead magnets. To merge the personal message, you should create a custom Text Area field. (I use a field called “Temp Text Area 1” for stuff like this… after I merge the data into the email, I then use an action set to set the field back to a blank value).

Now here’s the best part… you set things up so that if and when the prospect clicks the link to the lead magnet, you apply a tag that will add them to the main campaign for the lead magnet. So then Infusionsoft can follow up with them as if they had come to your web site and requested it normally.

So here are the main benefits of this strategy:

  1. You immediately capture and start following up with people as soon as they indicate interest by asking for your business card.
  2. You send them not just your contact info, but also some super valuable information that any genuinely interested person would want, then see if they click on the link
  3. With zero effort on your part, you see if they really are interested or if they were just being polite
  4. You then follow up and stay in touch with the genuinely interested people… the ones that clicked. Plus you’re able to leverage other campaigns that you’ve already built to do the follow up
  5. You don’t follow up with those that aren’t actually interested beyond maybe one or two more emails with the same link. No more time wasted on people that aren’t actually interested!

In Part 2 of this series, I’ll give you the nitty gritty details about how to put this simple campaign together (with some not-so-obvious tricks to make it even better). I’ll even share a complete checklist of steps to follow as you build it out in your own Infusionsoft app. Check it out here.

About Tyler Garns

Tyler Garns is best known for his work as the Director and VP of Marketing at Infusionsoft, where he led the marketing efforts that produced massive results between 2007 and 2012. But he’s also been the “go-to” Infusionsoft guy for many of the top marketers and Infusionsoft users out there. His combination of technical skill, Infusionsoft expertise, and marketing experience make him one of the most reliable sources of business breakthroughs for Infusionsoft customers.

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