Virtual business cards
Contact Info in a Click
The easier you make it for Internet prospects to contact you, the more likely they will.
BY MICHAEL RUSSER
Even though 43 percent of REALTORS® have a personal Web page, according to the 2001 NAR Member Profile, many practitioners lose a great marketing opportunity—not to mention running afoul of some state’s license laws—by not bothering to put their full contact information on every page of their sites.
But, just adding your contact information to every page of your site isn’t enough.
An e-mail link at your site is fine if prospects decide to contact you while they’re actually visiting your site. But not all buyers and sellers make decisions that fast. Instead, they look at several sites, consider their options, and then, hopefully, decide to contact you. Without a simple electronic way to capture your full contact information, prospects are left to bookmark your site and, you hope, return to it; take the trouble to cut and paste your contact info into their electronic address books; or write it on a scrap of paper, which very likely will be mislaid. Hardly the way to appeal to high-tech prospects.
There’s a much easier and more impressive way—one that will allow your Web site visitors to instantly load your entire contact record, and even your unique marketing message, into their e-mail address books with just one click of their mouse. All you need is your own virtual business card, or vCard.
A vCard is a text-based contact record that your prospects can quickly and easily access and store in their electronic address books using any operating system, including OSs for handhelds. You can also add graphics and multimedia, including property photos, logos, and audio clips, to your vCard. Outlook (2000, XP, and higher) as well as several other major professional e-mail software programs, but not AOL, allow you to create vCards.
Although many real estate professionals already use vCards as e-mail attachments, most don't realize that vCard records can be stored as a clickable link on their Web site, right next to their standard contact information.
When prospects running Outlook or other e-mail programs that support the vCard application, click on your vCard contact record, they instantly launch a contact record window. Visitors can then click “save” to add the entire vCard to their electronic address books. You can also make your marketing message or slogan part of your vCard by adding it to the main text window of your contact record. It’s a great way to brand yourself to prospects and clients.
To create your own vCard in Outlook (2000 or XP),
1. Go to the Contacts window and hit CTRL-N to open a new, blank contact record.
2. Fill in your contact information and marketing message and hit CTRL-S to save, but not close, your record.
3. Select Export To vCard File under the File menu to save your vCard to your hard drive. The file will adopt a .vcf extension.
4. Finally, upload this file to your Web site so users can access it through a link on every page. Note: You may need your Webmaster to help you with this last part.
Using vCards in this way is a great example of how you can take a technology tool meant as little more than an electronic business card and repurpose it with a bit of marketing kick. Plus, the thought of your contact record and marketing message being in the prospects’ electronic address books, well, that just warms my heart!
A word of caution
One way vCards are used is for storage of sensitive information, such as passwords, bank account numbers, and so forth, enabling you to quickly fill out online order forms or access account information. Keep this information secure by creating a separate vCard just for your eyes. With a vCard devoted to your contact information and marketing message, you ensure that prospects who download your card won’t know more about you than you want them to.
Tip of the Month
I have often extolled the benefits of using eFax Messenger Plus as a free alternative to Adobe Acrobat for producing “universally viewable” documents. A universally viewable document allows everyone with the appropriate viewing software installed to see a document on their computers just as you created it. However, because eFax Messenger is not nearly as widely known as Acrobat, most clients and prospects won’t have the necessary free eFax viewer installed to view what you send.
So why not create PDFs using the omnipresent Acrobat? Because to create PDFs—as opposed to viewing them--you typically had to use the full version of Acrobat, which costs nearly $200 and is clumsy to use. But how theres a If you currently don’t own the full version of Acrobat, you can get a special utility called PDFMailer, which allows you to very quickly and easily create and send PDFs that can be viewed using the Acrobat reader.
And it’s simple to use. Like eFax Messenger Plus, PDFMailer installs like a printer driver. That means to create a PDF of , say, a spreadsheet, you simply “print” the spreadsheet using the PDFMailer printer driver. The program automatically converts the spreadsheet into a PDF version, opens your e-mail program, and attaches the PDF file to an e-mail that you then address and send. It’s that simple.
You can download and use a free version of PDFMailer for as long as you want. However, it contains a one-line ad (about PDFMailer, of course) at the top of each page. For only $49, you can get the ad-free version, which is a lot less than the full version of Acrobat. Plus, you’ll find it much easier to use. While I love using eFax Messenger Plus because it allows for smaller file sizes and makes it possible for you to annotate e-mailed documents, there are times when only a PDF will do. In those cases, PDFMailer is the tool to use.
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More Resources:
For more information on working with Internet-empowered buyers, click here.
Humanizing Your Web Site , Michael Russer, December 2001.
Ten Web Sites that Pay , Mariwyn Evans and Christina Hoffmann Spira, April 2002
Previously by Ask Mr. Internet:
How Good Are You?
Make Your E-mails Look Great
High Tech Templates
Real Help From Afar
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