Print Shop Survival Tips

Here's a summary of a piece we created based on our interaction with many struggling print shops. See all 10 tips...
 

Small and Quick Print Shop Survival Tips

Live in the digital age – There’s no future living in the past. The printing process, market, customers and competition...

Know the competition – Digital technology enables your competition. Electronic media competes...

Be careful about commodities – Products are commodities when only price and delivery drive the buying decision. Competing for low-price...

Forget the “magic bullet” – There’s no software, hardware, gadget or gizmo that will miraculously improve your business. If there were a magic bullet...

Use small & quick to your advantage – Large competitors are limited to offering cookie-cutter products and solutions. Leverage your knowledge...

Head for your blue ocean – A thousand print shops go out of business each year because they were swimming in a red ocean. Understand why...

Break the rules for products & services – You’re in the communications solutions business: printing is just one of your tools. Skip convention...

Embrace data (information) – Data is crucial for your customers: communicating, analyzing audiences, spotting trends, etc. Simply talking...

Market your print shop – Customers can't buy anything from you if they don't know you exist. Market your print shop to make it easy for potential...

Make selling fun – Selling commodity print work is painful. Selling communication solutions like a consultant, however, can be fun. Learn...

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The Magic Bullet for Small Print Shops

When confronted by difficult or complex situations, it’s normal to look for easy solutions, painless cures and so-called “magic bullets”. Magic bullets supposedly work almost instantly, require no significant effort or investment and have no adverse effects. Small and quick printers need not search for magic bullets to improve their businesses…they can get them from any unicorn. Seriously, you can find magic bullets if you look in the right places.

Not-So Magic Bullets

Before telling you where to look, it’s important that we understand why so many supposed magic bullets have proven ineffective…why so many printers get so little out of the vast array of tools promoted by the print industry. Suppliers may argue to the contrary, but most magic bullets are too expensive, too complicated and/or require skills small printers don’t have and can’t readily acquire. Many magic bullets may work well for larger print shops with adequate financial and staff resources, but for small and quick printers they’re duds right out of the box. 

The website development magic bullet, for example, doesn’t work for many small printers because they don’t have the necessary skills of online marketing, copywriting, programming, search engine optimization, etc. Marketing services might seem like a viable magic bullet for small printers, but the websites (or lack of thereof) and online presence of many small and quick printers indicate this is likely to be another misfire. 

Many magic bullets such as QR codes, promotional items, email campaigns, signs and banners never left the gun for many small printers. Perhaps the classic case was the variable data printing magic bullet that ended up being nothing more than a very loud blank cartridge. Small printers bought VDP software by the truckload but were thwarted by the breadth of skills and extra software needed to create data-driven print files. 

What Are Magic Bullets?

All of this points out that magic bullets for small printers must be affordable, easy to use and sell and require minimal or no additional skills in order to be beneficial. See if you think the following three examples meet the criteria of magic bullets:

Magic Bullet #1 – DIY Mailings

You print pre-addressed postcards on your digital press using print files made from your customer’s design and address list. You cut, sort and drop off the job at the post office…done! You do all of this without buying any software, without studying the postal regulations, without cleaning up the customer’s address list, without filling out the USPS paperwork and without selling anything. If you know how to print, cut, count and the location of your post office, this is a potential magic bullet for you.

Magic Bullet #2 – Simple Personalization

Your customer needs tickets or forms which include unique numbering and a custom barcode. You send out the customer’s artwork and numbering/barcode requirements to a vendor who sends you printer-ready files, imposed the way you want, for your digital press. You print, cut and deliver the job without knowing anything about barcodes or creating them and without any new software or special skills. This fits the requirement of a magic bullet and you probably don’t even have to do any selling (customers usually don’t care how you things done). 

Magic Bullet #3 – Capturing VDP Opportunities

Your largest customer says his new marketing campaign requires mailing 20,000 self-mailers per month for about a year. He then says he needs to include some variable data such as image swapping, personalized salutations and the local agent’s contact details for each recipient. You simply say. “Send me your artwork and data and I’ll take care of it”. You contact your VDP print file vendor and forward him the customer’s material. Your vendor does all the data and address processing work and creates the VDP files for you to print. After printing and approving the proofs, you print, cut, sort and mail the jobs…month-after-month. Your biggest customer has become even bigger. You’ve done little more than find your vendor, take an order and do what you do best: printing and satisfying customers. Wouldn’t you call that a magic bullet? 

Look again at the three situations above and see how they fit the requirements for magic bullets: 

• Easy to use (you outsource the data and print file work then you print and deliver)
• Easy to sell (in many cases, selling isn’t necessary)
• Minimal or no additional skills needed (any skills relate primarily to taking orders)
• No upfront investment (services are pay-as-you-go)
• Immediate application (you can start selling and using today)
• You’ll have to trust us about the cost…but that’s a great reason to call

We aren’t unicorns but we do have plenty of magic bullets for you. Get yours and put them to work.

Web: www.ez-vdp.com

Phone: 888 977 4711 x134

Email: support@ez-vdp.com

Stop Stupid Marketing

Stupid Marketing: The process of trying to attract business while accomplishing just the opposite.

You'd be amazed how many print shop owners are quite good at stupid marketing. They aren't actually stupid but they aren't professional marketers, either. Stupid marketing mistakes are often obvious and can be disastrous.

One classic example of stupid marketing is: 

A print shop owner looking to expand his business finishes some lessons and decides to identify himself as a marketing services provider. As a good marketer, he knows he must let all of his customers know about his new services. He designs a very clever direct mail postcard campaign and adds some personalization to impress his audience. 

The campaign is hugely successful as evidenced by the print shop’s website experiencing a 45% increase in traffic immediately after the postcards are delivered. However, no phone calls, emails or any other communications are forthcoming. In fact, business overall seems to turn down rather than up! 

What’s the problem? Stupid marketing, of course!

As happens too often, the print shop owner failed to stand back and look at the image he was projecting to the marketplace. What’s that?

The owner did a great job announcing his new services and pushing his customers to his website…but, his old, ugly website delivered a totally different message to his customers:

• He does/did a lousy job of marketing himself
• He doesn’t keep his own marketing up-to-date
• He’s not particularly good with details
• He doesn’t have much sensitivity to image or brand
• If he’s this sloppy in his marketing, what else suffers?

Ouch! If you think the “stupid marketing” label is too harsh, consider this: the printer spent time and money to deliver a very negative message about his capability, image and brand to a large portion of his customer base. More to the point...he paid to drive away his existing customers! What do you call that?

We make this point intentionally edgy because we continue to see print shop owners doing this. But, now the good news!

We also see many other businesses doing exactly the same thing.

If your print shop does website design, you may have just learned a new trick for identifying and selling website opportunities.

Frogs That Print

Here’s the theory: typical print shop owners are like frogs. The question is whether that’s a flat, sun-bleached road-killed frog, a steamy hard-boiled frog or a happy, thriving frog. What type of frog are you?

Before we get to the frog thing, we need to take a simple look at the progression of print shop printing: 

• Thirty years ago everyone did only offset printing,
• Twenty years ago, some printers started digital printing, but it was still mostly offset,
• Ten years ago, many printers were doing offset and digital - and many “digital only” quick printers were popping up,
• Now, more and more print shops are dumping their offset equipment and outsourcing their offset printing…keeping the digital printing in-house

Of course, there are always exceptions, but you get the general idea. There's no question that digital printing is overtaking offset printing at an accelerating rate. There’s no question that the face (and location) of the printing competition is rapidly morphing. In the “offset days”, printers could identify virtually all of their competitors. The internet and the “digital” explosion, however, have made the competitive environment much broader and more complex: on-line print providers, office supply stores, mail houses and letter shops, mailing stores, the post office, integrated marketers, quick print shops, and even some customers (doing their own digital printing).

What kind of frog are you?

Flat, sun-bleached road-killed frogs - These are print shop owners offering only (or mainly) offset printing. Running back-and-forth across the highway to chase a shrinking number of offset opportunities, it’s only a matter of time until…splat…offset printing becomes a money-losing proposition (if it isn’t already).  

Steamy hard-boiled frogs - These are digital printers offering only static printing. They sit contentedly in their pan of water…but, they don’t see that the competition has set the burner on “high”. They adjust to the increasing water temperature until one day they find themselves financially boiled.

Happy, thriving frogs - These are digital printers that recognize the result of sitting in water racing to a boil. They realize customers increasingly need and use data to communicate...and to print those communications. They understand that they can get out of the hot water, and into a happier place, by making data and communication easier, more efficient and more profitable for customers. 

OK. Perhaps it’s a silly analogy. We apologize if you don’t like being compared to a frog, but here' the reality check:

• Anybody can have a digital press these days
• The barriers to digital printing are already very low and falling
• Do you sit in boiling water or are you in a happy data-digital place?
• Do web sites, banners, promotional items or email services put much work through your digital press?

See how we can help you out of hot water.

Do You Turn Away VDP Customers?

What do you do when your best customer calls to say that they want to run a direct mail campaign for six months with 50,000 pieces per week and full-blown variable data printing? If you already do VDP on a regular basis, you probably make sure the office door is closed for starters. Then, you jump out of the chair to start doing your best version of the I-scored-a-touchdown happy-dance while spiking your desk stapler (since you have neither a football nor a helmet handy ). Then you gather up your graphic designer, programmer, mailing services manager, production specialist and data expert. Ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom. Hallelujah!  What? You don’t do VDP?

Surely, you don’t want to turn away your best customer. You may never see him again. Then, your stapler would end up on the floor for a very different reason.

Printers face similar challenges constantly. For example, when a customer wants a print job that requires die-cutting, what do you do? Send him somewhere else? Not likely. You do the job and outsource the die-cutting, right? How about booklets? You probably do the same thing: you print the job and outsource the booklet-making. Addressing and mailing? Yep - same thing. Maybe you can even do some of these in-house. But, variable data printing?

To satisfy your customer, you could outsource the whole job to a printer who can handle VDP (and will insist on printing the job), but where does that leave you? Sure, you’ll make some money on the job, but you may find yourself with a queasy feeling about the whole arrangement. If your customer realizes that you’re just a middleman, you might need a really good story about the value that you add to the effort. Or, you can take charge of the project.

Why not use the same technique you use to handle the die-cutting and booklet-making ...outsource the part of the job you don’t do in-house? Outsource the VDP print file creation, the data work or even the address presorting. You do the graphics work and the printing, and perhaps the coating, mailing and other work. This way, you really are doing the VDP job (or, at least, the majority of it) and you’re adding nearly all of the value to the job. More work in-house? You get that, too.

Don’t turn away your best customer, or any customer, because they want variable data printing. Just know that when the opportunity presents itself, we’re here to handle your VDP print file-related work. When that phone call comes, be ready to start dancing and looking for a new stapler.

While you’re at it, you might want to make sure that your customers know that you do VDP. Notice that we didn’t use the “S” word...selling ( not stapler). Why not simply let customers know they can come to you for VDP. You might be surprised at the response.

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Using Rubber Chickens Can Improve Your VDP Jobs



Rubber Chicken



An interesting read on marketing tactics is Jon Spoelstra’s, Marketing Outrageously: How to Increase Your Revenue by Staggering Amounts! Jon details his experiences as a marketer for a variety of professional sports teams and provides plenty of examples of marketing outrageously. In one instance, renewals by season ticketholders for a pro basketball team were lagging. His technique for fixing the problem was to launch rubber chickens at those season ticketholders that were slow to renew.

We’ll explain how you can use the “rubber chicken” concept to jazz up your VDP projects.

Jon bought hundreds of the classic plucked rubber chicken, tied his message to a foot on each one and sent them in large, FedEx tubes normally used for drawings. If nothing else, the shear curiosity factor of receiving a mailing tube was enough to get the package opened…only to reveal a rubber chicken. The tag on the foot warned, “Don’t fowl out!”, and the accompanying material made a compelling offer for the ticketholder to sign up right away. The really creative campaign was a complete success.

Didn’t that cost a lot? Yes. However, Jon is also a fanatic about ROI. The thousands of dollars spent on the rubber chicken campaign paled in comparison to the revenue generated by the ticket sales. Nevertheless, we’ll leave the discussion about ROI for another blog to focus on outrageous marketing and variable data printing.

Another Rubber Chicken

The image on the left is one that we used in some of our own direct mail campaigns. Is it outrageous? Maybe. Provocative? Perhaps. Attention-getting? You bet. Did it get our message get read? Absolutely! In fact, we did an A/B test with the other piece being a dramatic shot of a snowboarder and some impressive “name-in-the-clouds” VDP text effects. You can probably guess how the test turned out. Writing on a woman’s stomach turned out to be our rubber chicken.

If you do go down the path of marketing outrageously, there is the potential for blow back. Our VDP girl campaign earned us an irate phone call from an older gentleman who was highly offended that his name appeared on the young lady’s stomach. He yelled something about it being evil at least five or six times. We apologized profusely and promised never to send him any more pornography (or anything else, for that matter). Besides that one complaint, we received plenty of kudos and inquiries from recipients…many of them from women. It certainly helped that our very creative (but sensible, conservative and female) graphic designer added the woman's perspective to things.

We see lots and lots of VDP jobs and, frankly, the majority of them seem more like rotten eggs rather than rubber chickens. Boring! It appears that many marketers have yet to recognize the creative and attention-getting potential of VDP. So, having firmly planted foot-in-mouth, we put together some suggestions for moving a little closer to the outrageous with VDP:

Ÿ Use a dramatic image that makes the piece stand out from the rest of the mail (a scantily clad woman is not necessary, however recipients are much more likely to be attracted to images of people or familiar objects or locations)

Ÿ Find a clever or unusual away to include the text with (or on) the image

Ÿ Make sure that the personalization stands out (it has less value if it can be easily overlooked or is hard to recognize)

Ÿ Also, make certain that everything looks clean and as natural as possible (it is easy to end up with weird-looking effects that can leave the wrong impression)

Ÿ Personalize with a simple message that compels the recipient to want to know why they got the piece

Ÿ You don’t always have to spell out the purpose or sender on the front of the piece (a bit of mystery can heighten interest to read the message on the back)

Ÿ Consider adding some additional personalization to the message on the back - even something as simple as versioning for gender, age, interest, political issue, etc. that connects with the recipient

Help your customers find their own rubber chicken and they may never think of you again as just a printer. For that matter, create a rubber chicken to launch at your own customers.

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