Why use Electronic Signature?
There’s far more to gain than just paper & pens saved – why use an electronic signature is really about instant sales contract, reducing sales friction, automating marketing & more. Oh, and it’s flat-out less expensive than paper when you include the factors below…
Why use an electronic signature? Why bother to fix what’s not broken?
It IS broken – you are losing money, you just haven’t yet considered the hidden factors. Don’t worry, you’re not alone – but there’s no time like now to get this fixed.
1. If-then conditional logic isn’t even possible with paper.
As an example, one could ask whether a patient has a family history of cancer and if they answer yes, get details, types, and how closely they’re related – but if they answer no, they just skip those fields, and more quickly move on to other questions. Logic can even change which docs need to be signed (say, if the signor is under 18, or a home price was over $X, etc). SwiftCloud allows for conditional logic this and more. This reduces the applications that are filled out incorrectly, saving your team serious time – it might only be 20 minutes per day, but that is then 100 minutes a week… that’s 86 hours a year. One year – success is often a lot of tiny things done well more than one big sweeping change – the time adds up.
2. You’ll actually make more money if you need sales contracts.
How? Reducing fall-out – paperwork that goes out and never comes back. If you’re still using PDFs or paper, then sending out a contract and waiting for it (hoping for it) to come back, you’re losing money. A percentage of all business done like that will be lost to rethinking, buyer’s remorse, or learning their neighbor’s uncle is also in that business and he’ll get you “a heckuva deal”. [see Tom Hopkins Dirty Words if you think we’re serious]. Electronic signature means you can get a binding signed contract instantly before the client is even off the phone.
3. You’ll annoy your customers less & provide a better experience.
Nobody wants a mortgage, they want a lower house payment, or to buy a house, etc. – they want benefits, not friction and hassles. By letting customers fill out e-signature paperwork in advance, where their browser will auto-complete most basic fields (name, address..), it’ll save time, and then when the customer shows up in person (if applicable to your business), you get right to the value part instead of necessities. What’s this worth? That varies by how much paperwork you have, but smoothing your new-client-intake is always smart.
4. You’ll increase referrals.
Why? By automating hand-off from paperwork to marketing. Most 1980’s-style paper & clipboard businesses don’t have a formal marketing system to move customer data (with their permission) into marketing, but with an electronic signature, it’s easy – one can instantly feed into the other. This means you can easily automate follow-up with a time-delayed autoresponder, sending the customer a survey an email right after their appointment. Use our reviews & reputation system, or build your own – the important idea is if the client’s happy, ask for referrals and make it very easy for them to do so – a web form.
5. You’ll improve your marketing ROI if you’re using ad-tracking.
By tying Google Analytics (Free!) and other ad-tracking systems to your new-client-intake as a goal, you’ll be better able to track offline sales.
6. You’ll reduce errors by automating data flows instead of relying on humans.
Little things like a typo in an email happen. With old-school paper & pen, a human has to type that into some computer somewhere for many businesses, or at the very least for marketing – leading to more errors. If you have complex forms, SwiftCloud can handle hundreds of data-fields and even more, with conditional if-then logic so the customer doesn’t get overwhelmed and sees just what they need to answer.
7. You’ll increase security & compliance, by reducing the risk of lost paper records.
For certain industries like medical or financial businesses, your destruction of documents on specific dates is required, as well as having an audit trail or chain of custody trail. Automating this will not only save time and money, it will reduce the risk of something going wrong.
8. Employees will be happier.
If you have to re-type a clipboard of handwritten data from an intake form twenty times a day, is that the best use of your time? It’s inefficient at best, and at worst, any off days or sloppy handwriting is going to create more problems. Happier employees lead to greater retention, and less dependence on human employees for menial tasks means greater engagement.
9. You can integrate signatures with payment or appointment booking.
Get money then signature, or signatures then money as you prefer. Payment options could depend on choices made in an e-signature doc, allowing you to streamline quotes and pricing, set up a “quote builder” so clients can easily see and edit choices with pricing to correspond. If you have an appointment-based-business, our upcoming appointment scheduling tool will allow for e-signature right within the appointment booking, so by the time a client or patient shows up, all the paperwork is already handled.
10. Last but not least, you’ll help the environment.
Sure, you’ll save paper, but it goes far beyond that to include frustration over paper printer jams, ink & toner running out. The energy, plastic, and chemicals used to make the paper, all so that it can then be later destroyed, since in most cases you just needed an agreement, not to keep the doc forever. Then there’s pens and pencils – which seem trivial, but plastic and resources to make them add up – then there’s transportation… then there’s storage and finally secure destruction of signed docs. Skip it all and go paperless.
So why not click here to start now for $1?
You can be set up in minutes.
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