News Archives - Page 4 of 10 - Marketing, content, & technology to help printers sell more printing

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

How many customer lists are you currently maintaining? One of your most valuable customer lists is the one in your print management information system (Print MIS). After all, that’s where you’re keeping track of everyone that’s placing orders, and everyone that’s paying you for the privilege of doing business with you. That’s a pretty significant list! When do you add people to that list? Do you add them to your Print MIS before they order printing from you? No, because that’s when they’re on your prospecting list. However, that’s also a pretty significant list because, after all, that’s where your customers are coming from. Prospecting for Print Buyers How do you turn prospects into print buyers? It starts by building relationships. Think back even further. How do you build relationships? By telling your story and starting a conversation with your prospect. Consider this: If your goal is to turn your prospects into customers, and your customers are managed by your Print MIS, doesn’t it make sense for your Print MIS to manage the marketing campaigns that target those prospects (i.e. your soon-to-be customers!) right from the start? Shouldn’t your prospect list and your customer list be managed together, as one list? We think so, which is why

We’ve heard over and over again about the challenges printers face when they receive an order online and then need to re-enter the same information into their print management information systems (Print MIS). Copy-paste makes the job easier, of course, but who wants to sit around copying and pasting all day when you could be spending that time working and selling more printing? Odyssey Changes Everything! “Odyssey” is the new Print MIS we’ll be revealing at Graph Expo, and Odyssey changes everything! Odyssey powers not only the Print MIS but also the order forms on your website. Any information your customers provide when they place an order on your website instantly and seamlessly becomes data in Odyssey. With Odyssey, your website is your MIS, and that means no more double entry! When your website and your Print MIS are two different systems, online print orders look like this: But when Odyssey eliminates double entry by keeping all of your data in the same system, the process flows smoothly, like a peaceful stream, like this: Six touchpoints are reduced to TWO! Not only is double entry eliminated, the whole workflow is streamlined, communication with your customer is more efficient, and you get more done

A print management information system (or Print MIS) helps printers manage their day-to-day production activities. Would you agree that a Print MIS should connect you with your print-buying customers from the time an order is placed until the time an order is completed? That’s common ground that we can all agree on pretty easily. Would you also agree that you should be communicating with your prospects and customers even when they aren’t ordering printing? Once again we can all come to a pretty quick agreement. Communication is, of course, important. It’s what leads to relationships. You can (and should) be building a relationship with your customers and prospects even before production begins, before they place their very first order! And after the job is complete, you can (and should) continue nurturing and growing those relationships with your customers to make sure they come back to place even more orders! Limits of a Traditional Print MIS 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? If your Print MIS removed the “before” barrier,

At some point in your life, we suspect that your mother (or someone else equally influential) taught you the value of sharing. Virtual sharing on the internet isn’t quite the same as the physical sharing our moms taught us, but it’s still important. The importance of sharing is what brings us to today’s big update: sharing the high-quality content on your website from Marketing Ideas For Printers is now a much bigger deal, thanks to a recent website update! Here’s what we mean. Take a look at these pages on a Marketing Ideas For Printers’ website: The Ideas Collection Greatest Treasures Sales and Marketing White Papers These are high-value areas on each website that receive new content from Marketing Ideas For Printers on an ongoing basis, so you’ll want to make sure this content gets shared! Here are two ways to make your mom proud and make sure everything gets shared: 1) You do the Sharing Every time new content shows up in these areas, you’ll want to share the new content through your social media channels. The new sharing icons on those pages make it super-easy to share the content with your social media friends, followers, and connections. Go to your website and give it a

One of our core values at Marketing Ideas For Printers is Positive Attitude. A slightly longer version of that core value reads like this: Positive Attitude: We find the best in every experience. It’s easy to “find the best” in good experiences, but we desire to find the best in every experience, including the not-so-good experiences. We had one of those not-so-good experiences happen a little over a year ago when a customer left us. Finding The Best Gut check. What just happened? Why did they leave us? Their answer: they were frustrated that their website wasn’t communicating with the technology they used to manage production. They wanted a website that communicated with their Print Management Information System (Print MIS). They wanted the efficiencies that would result when a website and a Print MIS can have a two-way digital conversation with each other. What they wanted wasn’t happening. That was the moment we said, “We can never be in that position again. A lack of integration with a Print MIS can never again be the reason we lose a customer.” Print MIS Integrations How do we “never be in that position again” and get our websites and Print MIS talking with each other? We could pursue integrations with existing Print MIS systems, but we’ve been

You will soon witness a landmark number: the 300th issue of the Printer@Work email newsletter! (Printer@Work is an email newsletter available to all Websites For Printers website clients.) Wow! 300 issues! Let’s make that number more real. Newsletter content is provided for delivery on the first and third Tuesday of each month. 300 issues ÷ 2 issues per month = 150 months, or 12-1/2 years. That’s a pretty good run! Each issue contains a unique original cartoon called T.G.I.Monday. Those cartoons start as a pencil sketch, which is then colorized by our design team. Each colorization takes, on average, 45 minutes. 300 issues x 45 minutes = 13,500 minutes (or 225 hours, or 9.375 days) dedicated to bringing the line art drawing to life with color. We always provide the default content, but our customers are encouraged to customize that content. The 300 issues of Printer@Work have been converted to custom newsletters 6,080 times. How many people receive Printer@Work? A lot. 146,111 at the time of this writing, to be exact. And it takes a while to send the newsletter to that many subscribers! When we hit the “send” button on behalf of our subscribers, Printer@Work takes about 6.5 hours to get all 146,111 issues delivered from start to finish. In case you’re

We recently completed a server infrastructure upgrade to increase the performance of your website. Wow, that was boring. Let’s try again. Everyone Wins! Everyone wins when a website is faster! We just added some rocket fuel to the servers that host the websites for Websites For Printers. With this added rocket fuel, you’ll see that: Everything your customers do on your website will be faster. Using order forms will be faster, viewing order history will be faster, and just viewing your website, in general, will be faster. Your customers win! All the back-end management you do to use and maintain your website will be faster, too. You win! Google and other search engines look favorably on websites that load faster. You win again! All this newfound speed makes you happy. If you’re happy, then we’re happy. We win, too! The rest of the details get geeky fast, so just carry on with your day with the assurance that we’re taking care of your web technology needs so that you don’t have to. But You Need to Know About the Hiccup Breaking News from our tech department: “Houston, we have a problem.” There was a hiccup during the server upgrade on April

Some Websites For Printers clients have recently received a notice from Getty Images regarding the use of one of their copyrighted photos in the Printer@Work email newsletter. In this letter, Getty is requesting a settlement amount of a few hundred to, in some cases, over a thousand dollars for the “unlicensed” use of this image. This has prompted a number of calls to our office asking for advice/resolution in this matter. Here are the nuts-to-bolts facts in this matter: All of the content provided on your website by Marketing Ideas for Printers is licensed by us for your use on your Websites For Printers.com website, The Buzz social media feeds, and Ink Inc. direct mail marketing newsletters. Because of this, rest assured, you are completely and legally in the right here. The content in question (a photo of a mother and daughter in front of a washing machine) that has triggered the “Getty Letter” is provided for use by a syndication service we use for the Consumer Reports publication. This image is licensed for distribution through the syndicator’s feeds, and it is completely legal for you to display this image on your website as per our syndication agreement. In recent months,

Every Websites For Printers website comes equipped with a fun and useful web page called Our List of Greatest Treasures. It’s a handy page your customers can use as a launchpad for many helpful websites. Here’s a sample of the Greatest Treasures page for our customers in the United States, and we have a Canadian version, too. Keeping the Content Fresh One of the signs of an amateur website is outdated content. That’s why we regularly review the content we provide to make sure it’s current and relevant. The Greatest Treasures page is checked each and every month to make sure the links presented are valid. Along with that monthly link check, the “treasures” themselves come up for review every January to make sure they are still, indeed, valuable. This year, we’re inviting you to be a part of the evaluation process. What treasures of your own would you like to add? What new links would you like to see added to that page? What would be helpful for your customers? Please send your suggestions our way by adding a comment below, or send a note to Rachel (our Content Manager) at Rachel@MarketingIdeasForPrinters.com. We may not “pilfer” every suggestion you send, but

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