How To Make Digital Business Cards for Educational Professionals [+Benefits & Best Practices]

As an educational professional, sharing in-depth details about your credibility is a must to build trust and inspire reach-outs when you’re networking. 

But can you really share more than the basic details from a 3.5″ x 2.0″ piece of paper? The answer is a clear no!  

Adding too much information in your card will make it look cluttered. Plus, recipients will be weary of typing your emails and URLs manually into their phonebook.

A practical alternative, instead, is a digital business card (or e-business card). Think of it as a contactless version of your regular card that people can click to interact. Plus: 

• You can put as many professional details as you want 
• Recipients can save your contact details directly (no manual typing) and
• Share their contact details with you via your card 

Keep reading to learn how to make a digital business card for educational professionals in minutes (not weeks) and the benefits over the traditional ones.

Table of contents

1. How to make a digital business card for educational professionals
2. Top 6 reasons why educational professionals should use digital business cards
3. Top 5 digital business card best practices for educational professionals
4. Network efficiently as an educational professional using Beaconstac’s e-business cards

How to make a digital business card for educational professionals

You can create a digital business card in a matter of minutes. Here are 5 quick steps to make a digital business card for an educational professional.

Note: We will demonstrate the process using Beaconstac’s digital business card solution.

Step 1: Select the template for your digital business card

Log in to your Beaconstac account. Then, click “+CREATE” located on the right-hand side of the dashboard.

Now, choose a digital business card template that aligns with your target audience, professional goals, and branding.

Step 2: Set up your profile and contact information

Under the “SETUP” tab, add all the details you want to display on your business card. You will find separate sections for Profile Information, Contact Details, and Social Links.

Profile Information: Here, you can add your profile details, such as your first and last name, designation, department, prefix, suffix, pronouns, company, and summary. You can also upload your company logo.

Contact Details: Scroll down to “CONTACT DETAILS“. Add your phone numbers, emails, website URLs, and Google Maps location.

Social links: Add links to your social profiles under “SOCIAL LINKS”, located at the bottom of the SETUP tab. You can add a social link to your digital business card by simply clicking the related icon (from 20+ options) or include a custom URL.

💡Pro tip: Each persona within your target audience require different services. So, it is best to categorize your prospects and add details relevant to each persona. For this, you can update existing digital business cards or create multiple new ones suited for each category of prospects.

Step 3: Customize your digital business card

Once your profile is set up, click the ”DESIGN” tab to customize your digital business card’s design to suit your branding and business style.

Select your preferred background color, font size, font style, text color, and more. You can also change the card layout if needed.

Top 6 reasons why educational professionals should use digital business cards

Here are six reasons why digital business cards are beneficial when networking as an education professional:

1. Always be networking-ready
2. Facilitate sustainable and eco-friendly networking
3. Share as many professional details as you require
4. Capture lead details instantly via two-way contact sharing
5. Facilitate real-time interactions with prospects
6. Track the results of your networking initiatives

1. Always be networking-ready

If you attend educational conferences, fares, and other public events, you know networking opportunities come unannounced. You also have a small window of time to exchange business cards in such cases. 

Paper business cards in such events struggle to stay put: 

• Your recipients may forget or misplace them (since they’re exchanged in large numbers)
• You can run out of paper cards and fail to seize opportunities
• Your recipients may never end up saving your details in their phonebook since that’s an extra, manual effort to transfer them from paper cards

Digital business cards keep you networking ready at any time, anywhere. No more losing the fleeting networking opportunities while your paper cards run out!

You have the benefit of sharing your digital business card via Google Wallet (or Apple Wallet), QR Code, or URL. 

These sharing methods are contactless and paperless, letting you project a tech-savvy and professional image. You create a solid first impression among your prospects.

2. Do sustainable and eco-friendly networking

Promote eco-friendliness and sustainability as you network. Instead of handing out paper business cards—90% of which end up in landfills—share your card via a simple QR scan or URL. 

In this way,  you reduce the environmental impact of printing paper business cards. You also cut down on the associated costs (as much as 87% of the printing costs).

Adopting these eco-friendly business cards projects your dedication towards sustainability, helping you resonate with prospects who prioritize environment-friendly business practices.

3. Share as many professional details as you require

You might be an education consultant offering private tutors to college students. You might have to share online reviews and your website in a card to build trust!  

With paper business cards, furnishing all your professional details within the standard 3.5” x 2.0” space could be challenging. Try adding all the professional details, and you could end up with a business card that is too content-heavy and less impactful. 

On the other hand, with digital business cards, you can share unlimited contact information—without cluttering the look and feel. 
Apart from your basic information, you can add your Google Maps location, essential website links, and social handles. And all the details are accessible with a click.

4. Capture lead details instantly via two-way contact sharing

Let’s say you are an overseas education consultant, networking at a high-footfall event such as an educational fair.

Now, if you use paper business cards, all you can do is share your contact details with a potential recruit. You will have to collect your lead data manually and this might demand time from both you and your recipient. But you can’t just share your business card and rely solely on the recipients to get back to you.

Digital business cards turn every card you share into an instant warm lead-generating channel via two-way contact sharing. With this functionality, your recipients get a prompt to revert with their contact details from the same card you share (via a simple form).   

The best part is that their details become automatically recorded in your digital address book (list of collected leads), where you can manage them later. 

You can also export this list to your company’s CRM software (Salesforce or 700+ other CRMs via Zapier).

This entire process is manual, time-consuming, and prone to error with paper business cards. 

5. Facilitate real-time interactions with prospects

Digital business cards are highly interactive. They let your recipients engage with your card details with a single click.

Let’s say you are an academic consultant. A student with whom you shared your e-business card wants to connect with you after a few days. Then, they can simply tap on the given phone number or email address on the card to connect with you via call or mail. They can access all the URLs or social links on your card similarly.

6. Track the results of your networking initiatives

You might have shared hundreds of paper business cards in a week. But once you share them, there is no way to track the conversions (unless you generate warm leads from every card you share!). 

You can measure and monitor the impact of your networking with digital business cards. Track and analyze card engagement metrics such as:

1. The total number of views your card receives
2. The total number of times a recipient saved your contact information
3. The number of unique recipients your cards reached 
4. Device details used to view your cards
5. The specific hours of the day recipients view your cards
6. The exact geographical locations where recipients view your cards

These valuable insights will help identify lucrative events, key contacts, and productive strategies. Moreover, you can refine your networking strategies with the help of this data.

Top 5 digital business card best practices for educational professionals

Here are some best practices that you, as an educational professional, must follow while making digital business cards:

Network efficiently as an educational professional with Beaconstac’s e-business cards

Having a digital business card is just the first step to efficient networking. You need a solution that enables you to create, share, and collect leads at scale. 

Beaconstac’s digital business card solution offers robust functionalities that can enhance networking, including: 

1. 100% digital contact sharing via Apple Wallet (or Google Wallet)
2. Two-way contact sharing to capture recipient information instantly
3. Powerful analytical capabilities to track your card’s engagement performance
4. Enterprise-grade security measures such as SOC® 2 Type 2 and GDPR compliance. 

The best part? You can access all of Beaconstac’s functionalities without downloading any additional apps.

• Author Details

Author Details

Athira Unnikrishnan

A passionate writer with an inquisitive eye for marketing, Athira comes with over 5 years of experience researching and writing about B2B SaaS products. Presently, she helps people understand the benefits of a digital business card and how they help modernize networking & lead generation. To know more about her work, and her published work around digital business cards, click here.

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