Credit Card Flash Drives Make Brochure Fulfilment Easy

If you’ve got a mail order catalogue, a trade brochure or a lot of graphic intense sales collateral that you need to distribute to your customers and historically you’ve been sending this out in printed form then maybe now is the time to consider sending this electronically.

With increasing postal charges and rising print costs there are many sound commercial arguments to move away from printed collateral to a digital version. For some markets, particularly clothing, the tactile nature of the catalogue(s) coupled with the ability to casually “browse” the catalogue means they are unlikely to be replaced by electronic versions in the short term, but, the rise of the iPad, other Tablet PCs and our rapid adoption of book readers like the Kindle may change this.

Of course, many companies will have already posted their brochures on a website and others, if their brochures are small enough, will have started to email these to their clients but these options are not always appropriate – brochures attached to emails, particularly if they are large files, will often get “blocked” or caught up in security filters and not everyone is happy to spend time on the web “browsing” a brochure.

An alternative, and one that seems to be gaining some momentum, particularly in the trade and professional sector, is to mail out a digitised brochure on a USB flash drive. The beauty of using USB flash drives for this purpose is that they are relatively cheap, they can hold huge amounts of information, they are small and lightweight and they are easy to use.

The Credit Card Flash Drive versions are so thin and light (they’re only 2mm thick) that they can be posted out in a

standard envelope using a standard “letter tariff”. As such postal charges, particularly if the brochures or catalogues are posted overseas, can be cut dramatically and the interactive nature of brochures can be retained by the use of flash and other creative and interactive techniques. For example, including or embedding small movie files or 3-D views of products can bring the products to life in a way that its simple not possible to do off the printed page.

Flash drives can easily be printed or customised to reflect the brand of the company distributing them and unlike large cumbersome catalogues they’re easy to carry around giving the brand that’s printed on them exposure they might otherwise not get.

So, if you’re responsible for looking after your company’s brochure or catalogue then maybe now is the time to consider distributing it in a digitised format on a credit card USB flash drive.