You need to know whether you should be printing a couple hundred or a couple of thousand business cards.
Designing a business card is an exercise in imagination. Actually
printing a business card, however, is an exercise in economics.
You should have a card that will, all other things being equal,
convince a potential contact to actually pick up the phone and contact
you. But all other things aren't necessarily equal, and no matter how
well-designed and memorable your card is, there's no one hundred
percent guarantee that the person you hand it to will contact you about
your business. When you think about distributing business cards, it's
vital to think in terms of probabilities and aggregates, rather than on
handing out fifty business cards and getting fifty new clients
overnight.
A good rule of thumb as far as online advertising goes is this: for
every two thousand people who visit your website, one will give you
money (whether through donations, buying a product from you, or even
through referring a friend who they know needs what you have to offer.)
This rule varies depending on supply and demand, of course: a website
selling hand-woven blankets will make fewer sales from ten thousand
visitors than will a website selling efficient, cost-effective graphics
software for all user levels. But when considering the rate of return
on your advertising budget, it's best to assume the worst, and two
thousand hits for every sale is not what anyone who starts a commercial
website really wants to consider.
Of course, business cards are not online advertising. The fact that you
can target your business cards to the people who are most likely to
have some positive impact on your business improves your rate of return
significantly. And assuming that your cards are good and your
distribution is appropriate, you can think in terms of ten to twenty
cards for a return--a great improvement on two thousand for one!
However good your distribution and your card, though, the number of
cards you should print will depend on the nature of your business. In
general, two rules are important to keep in mind:
• The more dependent your business is on clients and referrals, the more business cards you should print.
• The more money you make per referral, the more business cards you should print.
In order to understand the first rule, consider the different
promotional challenges faced by different types of businesses. Take,
for example, a web designer and a small pottery store. The web designer
works primarily from home, communicating with clients through email and
through occasional meetings with local clients. The pottery store does
a small business through a website, but also receives some amount of
foot traffic and walk-ins on a daily basis.
For the pottery store, business cards can help to bring in new
customers, particularly for the website portion of the business. (And
keeping a stock of business cards with the website address at the
counter of the store is by no means a bad idea.) But the store isn't
entirely dependent on referrals--the physical storefront brings in new
customers just by virtue of existing. The web designer, by contrast,
has no business outside of referrals--he has no physical location for
potential customers to visit, and a website containing his portfolio
and advertising his services is more dependent on online advertising
than on advertising in the physical world.
Business cards are essential in any business; just make sure that you pick a number that works for your business.
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