CD-ROM technology allows even “business cards” to wow customers with flashy presentations and images previously available only on sophisticated Web sites or in expensive four-color brochures.
A single CD business card has about 50 megabytes of memory — about the same amount that was on hard drives a decade ago and enough to give users a virtual tour of previous projects and provide them with any necessary forms to fill out and e-mail back to you, says Joel Compton, manager of Ellusions Inc. (www.identityrom.com). “The CDs are a little larger than a regular business card,” he says. “Any salesperson competing with other salesmen who use paper business cards has a real advantage. The customer can hardly wait to get that CD card into his computer to try it out.”
Even more attention-grabbing are custom-shaped CDs. “These CDs let you put hundreds of dollars of marketing information on a disc that costs less than $1,” says Tim Storer, president of New Media Gateway, parent company of CDFX (www.cdfx.com). “They’re great for direct mail since they cost the same to mail as a regular letter. They’re definitely the way of the future.”
Acheron Construction in Dallas uses mini-CDs as electronic brochures left behind with qualified leads, says office manager Jeff Everest. “They’re still pretty new, so we have to tell people how to use them, that the disc will fit in the regular disk drive,” he says. “Sometimes the customers can hardly wait for the salesman to leave so they can put the CD in their computer.