Jan

11

Using printed reference cards to acquire new members and keep existing members

Filed Under Marketing, Member retention

I spent the morning further researching reference cards for subscription site membership acquisition and retention. By “reference cards,” I’m referring to 8 1/2 by 11-inch pages that reduce procedures, tasks, or software programs to a series of concise, very visual steps.

Reference cards can contain 2, 4, or 6 pages.

As always when doing research on the web, vendor response differs from the automated–and, usually, irrelevant–to the very competent. It appears that pricing for reference cards is not as prohibitive as expected in relatively small quantities. Of course, as the sales numbers increases, per-card costs dramatically drop.

The other major takeaway from my recent research into reference cards is that they don’t always have to be printed. Reference cards can be created and made into Adobe Acrobat PDF files for member and prospect downloading. Click here to download a great example of a PowerPoint reference card by O’Reilly. http://www.csa.com/support/QRC.pdf

Let me know if you’ve used reference cards as part of your marketing funnel, or as membership premiums, for your membership site.

Comments

One Response to “Using printed reference cards to acquire new members and keep existing members”

  1. Mark on January 14th, 2008 3:49 am

    Roger -

    Microsoft Office Tutorials
    Another excellent source of reference card models are the Microsoft training tutorials.

    Each app has multiple task specific training tutorials. At the end of each tutorial is a reference card for that task. They are free, as are the tutorials.

    Here is the link to the PowerPoint 2003 Tutorials

    Job Aids
    There is a considerable body of literature for designing and developing job aids that would be applicable to the design of reference cards.

    In an Amazon search for job aids, the first three books are superb resources. Rossett’s 1991 Handbook of Job Aids is now something of a classic.

    Each book addresses

    the different functions job aids can serve
    formats most appropriate to each function
    design & development guidelines
    testing, implementation and evaluation of their effectiveness.

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