Electronic signatures have been embraced successfully in all aspects of life. In fact, most people currently have been exposed to some kind of e-document signing. For instance, if you have ever tapped on the “I agree” tab during an online-based transaction, you were unsuspectingly using an e-signature.
Those businesses, therefore, that have been hesitant in adopting this new technology have been disadvantaged in many ways; and it goes without saying that their money, which could have been spent in other vital ways, is being wasted mercilessly. After all, when in business, you look everywhere you can, to reduce your expenses and operation costs. Eventually, these savings add up to a consequential sum.
The following are a few ways on how e-signs can make help your business save money, in the long run making you rich as you have always desired.
- Time is money
Whoever coined this saying was spot on. One of the key benefits of electronic signatures over their wet-ink counterparts is that they save the user a lot of time. Think of the time you take to physically process documents in your office – printing, signing, posting, and waiting for the document to reach your recipient. If at all you used e-signatures to esign documents, you would get this done in a matter of minutes. Time saved as a result of signing documents online may be spent on other productive and money-making ventures.
- Save money from paper-related costs
Electronic signatures will save you a lot of money on paper supplies. By digitally processing your documents, you will be saving thousands of paper-related expenses annually. First, the money used in purchasing printing papers, ink, and stamps will reduce drastically. Secondly, you will cut on charges that would otherwise be incurred in maintaining your printing, scanning, and paper shredding machines. Getting technicians to set up copiers and printers, and then fix them when they break down is very expensive.
Lastly, even if you have documents stored manually in your office, you will still need to buy new folders and filing cabinets. However, with an e-sign solution in place, your most vital documents will always be electronically stored and secured, so that you do not waste money purchasing unnecessary cabinets to store the documents.
- Make your business move faster
Imagine if your organization has an electronic signature solution in place, invoices and sales quotations would be received much more swiftly. Your clients can easily e-sign documents via their tablets, mobile phones or computers, from any geographical location as long as they have internet access.
Basically, with an e-sign solution in place, the amount of time expended in manually signing and processing sales contracts will be reduced significantly, allowing deals to be completed almost immediately. And what does that mean? More money is flowing into your account on time!
- Happy customers translate to more money
Who doesn’t like getting the services they need on time? Like we have mentioned above, with this technology, your customers can esign documents orders and other purchase documents from anywhere, on any digital device. You can get your delivery forms and invoices you need to cater to your clients twice as first. This leaves the customers happy, and much more willing to do business with you again and again.
And as you might be aware, concentrating on repeat customers (customer retention) creates long-lasting, cost-effective relationships. According to a research carried out by Bain, if you improve your customer retention rate by just 5%, you can boost your profitability by up to 95%. To stress on this further, according to a survey conducted by Gartner, 80% of your future proceeds or revenue originates from 20% of current (repeat) customers.
- Get rid of costly errors
Since electronic signatures provide a simple way to monitor the progress of vital documents, they also considerably reduce errors, such as sending the wrong contracts to the wrong people, misplacing documents, and not correctly recording document signature information. These types of mistakes can lead to costly legal problems in the long-run – especially in cases where a signed agreement is being contested.
Exactly how much money can your organization save with e-sign solution?
Let us try to calculate the paper-related costs for a 20-person organization. On average, the organization signs 600 documents monthly; meaning, each employee signs approximately one document per day. Let’s also assume that the organization manually files and scans 300 documents monthly, which translates to about 50% of the total documents. By using these figures to calculate the ROI, we can conclude that this organization would probably save around $10, 000 annually on paper-related costs.
Conclusion
All said and done, investing in an e-signature solution comes with some capital costs; however, the savings realized in the long run are worth the investment. If you repeatedly make it a habit of e-signing on the dotted line, then you are on the right road to making more money.
Author Bio:
Shailender Kumar is a passionate digital marketing analyst. He can be best described as an elusive reader and technology evangelist. He enjoys writing about helpful and practical business solutions.
