Hey, DZOs: Let’s End Two Unnecessary Expenses, Together

If you’ve been running a dropzone for a while, we already know a couple of things about you. Ready?

1. You’ve walked out of the office at the end of a busy day and grimaced to see a flurry of Certificates of Achievement blowing around under the empty picnic tables.
2. You’ve winced at the way the cost of USB image delivery digs into your margins.
3. You’ve got a knack for optimization, and you refuse to stand idle and watch profits seep out of the slow punctures.

We get it. Boy, do we ever.

The Certificate of Achievement has been a stone-cold classic since the earliest days of tandem skydiving, but the attendant marketing ROI is near nil. Even though it feels like a necessity to hand one over the desk to every freshly-landed tandem, perhaps one in several thousand students actually frames and mounts it. Just like brochures, they often journey straight from your offering hand to the dumpster outside—and they certainly ain’t free to print.

Y’know what else isn’t free? USB thumb drives. Far from it, in fact. When CDs and DVDs left the picture in favor of the now-ubiquitous USB, the dropzone balance sheet took another meaningful hit.

Handily, the solution to both pain points is in precisely the same place: the cloud. After all, your customers want the same thing you want: beautiful, seamless online delivery for everything that makes sense. Millennials, and Gen Z’ers especially, demand the means to quickly, easily show off their accomplishments in digital form.

With that in mind, we’d like to haul out the very long list of cool stuff Sigma does, and we’d like to point out two of those items that will be of particular interest to you and your DZ bottom line.

1. Merits are the new Certificates of Achievement

With merits, customers can quickly, easily take their digital certificate of achievement and publish it wherever they would like it to be seen on social media. The knock-on benefits for your business are notable: what was once a bin-bound piece of paper suddenly becomes a marketing tool to help raise brand awareness and sales conversion.

2. The Certificate of Achievement and the customer images are now two sides of the same (shiny) coin.

Get this: Dropzones can append all of an individual’s photos to his/her merit. Social sharing couldn’t be easier, and costly USB sticks become a thing of the past.

3. Every day is Earth Day.

Aside from being slightly past their sell-by date, printed Certificates of Achievement and USBs have another thing in common; they’re physical waste. We don’t need to tell you that releasing the need to hand those suckers out will save you big money on printing. We might remind you, however, that the countless reams of paper you once used to print them on will henceforth stay in tree form. Those expensive little USBs, too, have a tendency to find their way into the landfill (though there are better ways to offload them, for sure). Switching out both elements for a digital strategy is a pro-environmental move you can confidently celebrate in your marketing.

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So, that’s two unnecessary expenses, eliminated in one fell swoop. There’s a lot more to love about Merit beyond that, of course; come for the widened margin, stay for the measurable operational optimization. We’d love to continue the conversation about how merits can turbocharge your dropzone. Reach out! We’re here to help you strategize.