Dave Hultin, Author at Marketing, content, & technology to help printers sell more printing

Odyssey, MIS, Marketing Ideas For Printers, How Much Does Odyssey Cost?

If you’re a “just give me the facts, please” type of person, the price for Odyssey is as follows: a recurring monthly subscription fee of $499 (USD), plus a $2,999 (USD) one-time setup fee to get started. Currently, Odyssey requires a website (with the Ecommerce Suite) from Marketing Ideas For Printers. That means you’ll have not only a forward-thinking Print MIS under your fingertips but also a world-class website! (Later, Odyssey will be available for use on any website.) Odyssey’s Pricing and Benefits So, I know what you’re probably thinking. “How does Odyssey help me sell more printing and pay for itself?” Or, there’s this one, “Switching to a new MIS is a huge headache. What’s so different about Odyssey that I’ll know it’s really worth it?” Finally, “I’m thinking about it, but why hurry?” Well, let me answer those questions for you with three of the benefits I believe will be the most impactful for you: Question #1: How does Odyssey help me sell more printing and pay for itself? By eliminating double-entry and creating a more efficient hand-off from your customers to your team. Just think of all the time it takes your team to copy the information from an online order and paste it into

What happens when you pour water into a cup? It takes the shape of a cup. Into a fishbowl? It takes the form of the fishbowl. You see the pattern here; water always takes the shape of the container it’s poured into. The water responds to the container; the water is responsive. It’s the same thing with website content: Website content takes the shape of the device displaying the content. Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase responsive website: The website content responds to the device that’s displaying the content, and that is what makes a website responsive. That’s why certain websites (like the one you’re viewing now) look great whether viewed on a desktop computer, a tablet, or a mobile device. Give it a try. Pull up this blog post on all your devices, and you’ll see the content beautifully displayed in a manner that fits the device being used. The Mobile Tipping Point There’s no shortage of studies showing the widespread adoption of mobile devices. As a planet, we crossed the tipping point in October 2016. (See Mobile and tablet internet usage exceeds desktop for first time worldwide.) We’ve not yet reached that level of penetration in the United States, but we will soon!

Odyssey, MIS, Marketing Ideas For Printers, The Personal Touch is Gone. Now What?

Gone are the days when you could count on a friendly smile with your purchase. Sure, you can still get that warm smile, but these days we head to the self-checkout line and intentionally choose to skip the opportunity for that friendly smile altogether. That’s a topic I explored in a recent article published on LinkedIn entitled, Connecting People to Process. (If we’re not already connected on LinkedIn, please take this opportunity to connect with me while you’re there reading the article. Thanks!) Who’s In Control? You don’t have a self-checkout line in your print shop, but your print-buying customers probably feel like most Walmart shoppers. They don’t always want a personal touch anymore! They want control – the control to regulate their buying pace, the control to access and change their order whenever they want, and the control to not wait for you. The Easiest Process Wins If your customers are exercising their control and choosing to skip the personal touch, that means they’re going online to order printing. Today, over 70% of buying decisions are made before a conversation with a real live human even occurs. 70%!!! And all signs point to that number going even higher in the future. Let’s go back to the

Mowing your yard or planning a vacation: that’s the kind of project you can accomplish on your own. Sometimes, though, a project is bigger than one person. A recent LinkedIn article, Growing More Than I Realized!, talked about the importance of teamwork in super-size projects. Here’s the key takeaway from that article: When your vision is grand, you have to let go and trust the team around you to carry out your vision. Trusting your team is an important part of the equation, but it’s not the only part. ENCOURAGE YOUR TEAM Just expecting your team to perform isn’t enough. You have to provide the environment, the guidance, and the inspiration for your team to make their own choice to join you on the journey. The world is filled with leadership techniques about that very topic. Leaders have poured days, weeks, and months into developing complex ecosystems around their teams. There’s a place for that, but there’s also a place for the simple day-to-day activities. Here’s a simple activity I do to help inspire the team around me. I take a few moments to scribble out a sincere hand-written note of encouragement to someone on my team. That’s it! That one simple activity can provide a big boost

Color is your world. It’s part of what you do every day. You know how color emphasizes your perception of the products it appears on, and so do your customers. Or maybe they don’t. That’s why it’s a good idea to remind your customers that they can Win Customers With Colorful Packaging. That’s the topic (and the name of!) the newest Print Tip added to the Ideas Collection of every website provided by Marketing Ideas For Printers. Here are the three tips your customers will see when they visit the Win Customers With Colorful Packaging tip on your website: Ask yourself which one color gets your message across. Always plan a family of products and marketing assets in advance. Always do a color-accurate printed proof. The tip finishes with this mandate: Always consider how things will look and how they will make your customers feel. By keeping these vital color rules in mind, you can create packaging, brochures and other assets that make your brand attractive to consumers and easily recognized. Here’s how Win Customers With Colorful Packaging is presented on one of our public demo websites. With content like this, you will always be the expert your customers turn to when they’re ready to print their

Meet Sal. When it comes to search engine expertise, she’s one of the most influential people I know! Sal has an “insider’s view” to exactly how search engines work, and I’ve had the opportunity to work with her firsthand for several years now. Sal has a knack for knowing exactly what makes a website appealing from a search engine’s perspective from the moment she first visits a website. Today, I’ll share some of Sal’s top suggestions on what you can do to keep your website in tip-top shape for search engines. Act Like a Human Sal is quick to point out that websites are, first and foremost, used by people. Because websites are used by people, search engines give preference to websites that are written to focus on a human audience. Contrast that with the earlier days of the internet. Search engines were very functional in their approach to the websites they visited, and search engines gave preference to websites that functioned well. Functionality is still important, of course; all of your links need to work, and your pages need to load without errors. But search engines are much smarter now. Search engines prefer websites that are not only friendly to web

We will soon be relaunching the ezMail website at EmailMarketingForPrinters.com, and with that relaunch, you’ll learn about the new path of email marketing offered by Marketing Ideas For Printers. Spoiler Alert: ezMail is being phased out to make way for the more robust marketing tools planned for the all-new Print Management Information System (Print MIS) from Marketing Ideas For Printers, code-named “Odyssey.” Not only will Odyssey manage the day-to-day activities of print production, but it will also include a marketing suite to connect you with your prospects and customers at every stage of the print-buying cycle. When the ezMail website relaunches on Thursday, December 8, 2016, all free ezMail plans will be discontinued, and ezMail will be removed from all Grow and Conquer website bundles. However, ezMail will continue to be available for all current ezMail subscribers with a paid subscription, as well as for all active users of an ezMail account included in a Grow or Conquer website bundle. (“Active” means the ezMail account has been accessed between January 1, 2016, and November 28, 2016.) With ezMail subscriptions soon to be no longer available (except for our existing customers with active ezMail accounts), it’s time to check out Odyssey, the future of email marketing for printers! CHECK OUT ODYSSEY

You know that warm, fuzzy feeling you get when others in the community start saying nice things about your company? That kind of advertising is priceless! How do you get ’em talking about you? Better yet, how do you help your print-buying customers get the community talking about them? Once you help your customers generate successful word-of-mouth marketing, you can bet they’ll be talking about you next! 5 Steps to Get ‘Em Talking Here’s a tip that will help your customers get the conversations going: Smart Companies Get People Talking. It’s the newest Marketing Tip to appear in the Ideas Collection on all websites from Marketing Ideas For Printers, and it covers the five Ts of successful word-of-mouth marketing: Talkers Topics Tools Taking Part Tracking Once you help your customers get started with their word-of-mouth marketing, you can bet they’ll be saying good things about you, too! For printers using websites from Marketing Ideas For Printers, this new tip is found in the Marketing Tips section of the Ideas Collection. Not using a website from Marketing Ideas For Printers? You can see the tip here on one of our demo websites. Or better yet, experience it for yourself by requesting your own personal demo website. START FREE DEMO

“Odyssey” is a new breed of Print Management Information Systems (Print MIS) that eliminates double entry and expands the scope of Print MIS to include marketing. Odyssey Eliminates Double Entry Gone are the days when your customers place an order online, and you have to copy the information they provided and paste it into your Print MIS. With Odyssey, your website is your MIS, and that means no more double entry. Odyssey Includes Marketing What if your Print MIS not only managed your interactions with your customers during the production of their print jobs, but it also helped you communicate with your customers and prospects before and after the time they were buying printing? Because Odyssey is a Print MIS with marketing automation, Odyssey has you covered at all stages … before, during, and after! Learn About Odyssey Odyssey will launch in January 2017. If you take the time to learn about Odyssey now, you’ll save $2,000 off Odyssey’s startup charge. How do you learn about Odyssey? By signing up for one of our no-obligation webinars! The webinars are scheduled every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, pick the one (or more!) that works for you. The complete schedule can be found at the bottom of mi4p.com/mis. Sign Up for a Webinar

A few weeks ago at Graph Expo 2016, we presented the alpha release of “Odyssey,” the codename for the new Print Management Information System (Print MIS) designed to end printers’ double-entry dilemma. We thought, “If a print buyer is entering order information on a printer’s website, why does the printer have to re-enter it into their Print MIS?” Removing Steps to Eliminate Print MIS Double-Entry One of our biggest sources of inspiration for building Odyssey is a yellow book titled Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal. In his book, Eyal refers to another book (Something Really New: Three Simple Steps to Creating Truly Innovative Products, by Denis J. Hauptly) when he says this: First, Hauptly states, understand the reason people use a product or service. Next, lay out the steps the customer must take to get the job done. Finally, once the series of tasks from intention to outcome is understood, simply start removing steps until you reach the simplest possible process. That’s it! Odyssey removes steps (the steps that are responsible for double-entry of order information) and helps you reach the simplest possible process by reducing six touchpoints in the order entry process down to two! The result? No more double entry in your Print

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