News Archives - Page 7 of 10 - Marketing, content, & technology to help printers sell more printing

Everyone’s using social media to share birthday greetings, tell the world about their new favorite food, and complain about the weather. But how do you use social media to sell more printing? Ironically, you use social media to sell printing by not selling printing. Huh? Social media is about being social, not “sales pitch-y!” If you use social media to be social, you’ll start to connect with customers and prospects. You’ll start a conversation with them … a conversation rooted in a constant stream of fun and interesting information delivered via social media. Then, some day when they need to buy printing, who’s going to come to the top of their mind? YOU! The person they’ve been having a conversation with! And that’s the point where social media turns from a conversation into a sale! If speaking social media isn’t your native tongue, starting the conversation can feel awkward. That’s where The Buzz comes in! The Buzz is a month-to-month subscription service; it’s your social media conversation starter. We’ll provide content for Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and posts for your blog all ready for you to use at the push of a button. The Buzz takes away the hassle of coming up with social media content on

We have exciting news…but only if your customers send you files electronically. (That was a joke — of course your customers send you files electronically!) We’re making some major improvements to the Send a File process on our websites, and the enhanced Send a File tool is now available on our demo websites for you to kick the tires. Every single improvement we made was focused on the goal of making it easy for your customers to buy printing from you. Among the improvements are: Your customers can now access the Send a File tool from any page in your website, not just their account page. Files start loading immediately upon selection, while your customers continue to provide file information. This means the files get a head-start on the transfer; your customers will think they hit turbo-boost! The whole process has been streamlined, so your website visitors never have to say, “Just send the file already!” Attaching files to existing orders is now a simple point-and-click. Now your customers can “fire and forget” their files. Once they’ve selected their files and clicked “Send”, their work is done; the website will do the rest. We’ll turn it on for all Websites

Predictable, recurring direct mail marketing campaigns continue to provide an excellent return on marketing dollars. For a limited time, Marketing Ideas For Printers Announces $2 ZIP Codes for Ink Inc. Subscriptions As an Ink Inc. customer you enjoy the benefit of knowing that noone else is allowed to mail the same direct mail marketing campaign into the ZIP codes or postal codes licensed for your use. The marketing territory is exclusive to you, allowing you to be “the only printer in town” marketing to the selected customer base. Now, for a limited time (through December 15, 2014) add licensed ZIP codes/postal codes to any Ink Inc. subscription for just $2 per ZIP /postal code per month. That drops the published price of a $10 ZIP / postal code by 80%, allowing you to easily expand the reach of your direct mail marketing campaign at a very low cost. This offer is available to both current and new Ink Inc. subscribers. There’s no fine print, but here are a few details that will help make sure we’re all on the same page. The $2 ZIP codes / postal codes are available for any new subscribers to add to their new base package. Current subscribers will continue to pay the

By now, you either have heard or will soon hear about a security vulnerability called the “POODLE” vulnerability. This is an internet-wide error that impacts very old browsers in particular (like Internet Explorer 6). Some of you have received notices from Authorize.net regarding this issue, and may be wondering: is my Websites For Printers website okay? In a word, yes. We have completed a thorough inspection of our sites, and found only a handful of areas that made use of the SSLv3 model (the protocol at the heart of this vulnerability); none of which were in areas that exposed sensitive data. Our key technology partners are ramping up security on their own sites to manage this bug, and we are actively in the process of reprogramming our own features to match those new standards where applicable. The most important thing for you to know as a Websites For Printers customer is that we’ve got you covered. It sounds so predictable to say “The security of your website is a top priority for us.” That’s predictable…and it’s true. Your website is safe with us. Want to know more? The details about this exploit get very geeky very fast. If you want to learn more about the POODLE

Sonny and Cher. Peanut butter and chocolate. Direct mail and websites. All of those pairs really work well together. Here’s one more to add to the list… ColorMatters postcards and Websites For Printers websites. Starting now, Marketing Ideas For Printers customers can promote a new landing page that not only talks about the benefits of color printing, but also includes a clear call to action to encourage website visitors to purchase color printing. This new landing page is built into the website of every Marketing Ideas For Printers customer that uses both ColorMatters and Websites For Printers. Here’s how it works. Produce your ColorMatters postcard just as you always have, but add /ColorMatters to the end of your website address, like this: Now, when your customers see your ColorMatters postcard, they’ll be directed to the new ColorMatters landing page (AcmePrintingUSA.com/ColorMatters, for example). On the landing page, they’ll be greeted with graphics that match the ColorMatters postcard you sent them, along with a strong nudge to purchase color printing from you. But what about customers who might not have received your ColorMatters postcard yet? What if they’re just coming to your website unprompted? You also have the option to display a Home Page Callout Box that

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a tree? Well, let me tell you because I am a tree. Most people have a one-sided perspective of trees, such as trees being nothing more than cozy homes for birds, squirrels, and other cute (but annoying to trees) animals. Or trees as the subject of famous poems. Lately, people have been building elaborate homes in trees because they want to live off the ground and away from dirty, noisy cities. Some civilizations even worship us trees and attribute magical properties to us. People love me! But, speaking confidentially, as tree to human, I am not the calm, enduring tree you think I am. In fact, I worry about a lot of things, especially about what happens to me when I die. I like to think that when the time comes for me to go, it is for a good cause. You see, trees understand that humans need wood for survival and economic purposes. But please, don’t cut me down just to be left to die a meaningless death in the forest. Rumor has it that some businesses are wanting to build strip malls and parking lots (just what humans need more

My family loves camping. We started camping nine years ago, back when our kids were two, four, and six years old. We drove a GMC Yukon, hooked the camper up to the hitch, shoved the kids in the back seat, and hit the road. Traveling was a blast! We’re getting ready for this year’s camping season and it’s pretty much the same formula, but with one important change. My family informed me that in order for us to have a successful (and by successful they mean “happy!”) camping season, we would need a tow vehicle with three rows of seating instead of two. You see, nine years later the kids were getting bigger, but the Yukon wasn’t. So a few weeks ago, with a certain amount of sentimentality, the Yukon left our family, and our driveway welcomed a new-to-us Chevy Suburban with three rows of seating. Let the camping season begin! Email is like that too. “The kids were getting bigger but the Yukon wasn’t,” is replaced by “The files are getting bigger, but the email capacity isn’t.” That’s changing, as of June 1, 2014! You’re about to get more email capacity, and unlike my purchase of the Suburban, this upgrade is pretty tame on

What You Don’t Need To Worry About, And What You Should Look Into You’ve probably been hearing quite a bit lately about a security flaw, called Heartbleed, that was recently discovered on the internet that impacted several big sites on the web. And we’ve started to get questions from you about it. We’ll keep it simple: Your website with WebsitesForPrinters.com was not vulnerable to this bug, and no action is required of you or your customers to protect your accounts. However, our email service partner was affected by this bug. They patched it within 24 hours of the bug being announced, leading to some down time earlier this week as they patched their server. As a result of that change, some of our customers had to update their server settings in their email clients. Meanwhile, several large internet sites were affected. Here’s a list of the biggest sites that were vulnerable as of April 8th: Vulnerable sites report If you use those sites, it’s advisable to change your password (after you’ve confirmed with them that they’ve patched this, that is). And, as usual, it’s always important to use a different password for each website you use.

…And Three Years of Excellence Are Just Beginning! Today, we released an extremely rare production alert to our Dingbat/Coffee Break newsletter subscribers upon learning that it mistakenly reports the day the Golden Gate Bridge opened as May 27, 1981. We’ve corrected the error and uploaded new files to the server. This marks the end of a two-year streak of error-free newsletters across all of our Ink Inc products — but we’re certain it won’t be the last two-year streak, because we have a secret weapon: our bounty system! In our bounty system, every newsletter gets reviewed by every employee, and they get a $5 bill for every error they find! As you might expect, we catch a lot of errors this way. We even catch things that aren’t technically errors but can be improved. So we’re all the more shocked that this absolutely obvious error made it past all those motivated eyeballs! Maybe we just need to brush up on our history? And so, thanks to our bounty system, we now enter the beginning of our next error-free streak for Ink Inc products.

On April 1st, we made some updates to the website’s notification system that sends email updates of website activity to you and your customers. (An example of such an email is the “Order Placed” email received when a customer places an order.) The updates were created to allow the system to function better with our growing portfolio of fully custom websites. Unfortunately, those changes also broke the functionality for all notification recipients except for the designated Customer Rep for printshops, companies, branches and individual contacts. If you’re waiting for the obligatory “April Fool’s”, we’re sorry to say it’s no joke. This file was in place for approximately 26 hours, beginning April 1st at about 8:30 AM CST. The good news is that your customers were unaffected by this error, and the system also delivered all notifications to the customer reps assigned to any printshop, company, branch or individual contact. However, any additional users (other than the customer rep, that is) assigned to the notifications lists in the Control Center did not get their notifications. The error was repaired April 2nd at approximately 10:00 AM CST. Now the notifications system works for our standard Level 2 and Level 3 sites as

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