Is your office still going ‘paperless’?? How far along have you gotten? Today’s savvy sales, marketing and accounts receivable folks know that there is a balance between the two worlds. Print and digital media are complementary forms of communciation and both impact the environment.
Try planting a tree. What you get is more trees. A harvestable and renewable crop that reduces a negative carbon impact. Try planting a laptop or your old clunky PC desktop with tower. What do you get? Landfill.
So, now that we’ve cleared the air, let’s look at how clients and prospects consume information. Today’s smartphones are growing at an incredible rate but still only amount to 10% of all cellphone users. Email overloads cause many an email to become lost in the Monday morning stack or the Fried Friday futile rush.
Direct mail pieces can reach their targets unimpeded by Do Not Call list restrictions and spam filter. Today’s technology astute client wants information quickly, electronically but that doesn’t mean there aren’t times when an old fashioned “printout” for reading and notetaking will be the preferred choice.
Paper makes a lasting impression. Literally. While there are paper documents more than 2,000 years old that are still plainly readable, you won’t find any digital media today that can last that long.
Ink and paper endure. Digital data on your desktop or retained within a cloud computer are subject to being lost beyond your control. Equally, as facebook has proven, some information that you wish you could tear up persists for years.
Think about the audience with whom you are communicating and think about the longevity of the information before you choose either paper or pixels. Your choices are more infinite and your audience reception more varied. Choose to get your message through in a way that is most valuable to your recipient. Don’t think that there is only one correct form of communication. Any sales person can tell you that repetition of your message helps to get it out there and keep it out there. #paperNpixels both play a role