Updates Archives - Marketing, content, & technology to help printers sell more printing

Last week, my wife dropped her iPhone. She was upstairs, and I was downstairs when I heard the phone hit the floor. This was not your ordinary phone drop; this was the phone’s life-ending “thud!” I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to replace her phone, and it was because of one easy change: flexible pricing. That’s the starting point for the video below (4:28), which explains the new, flexible pricing for websites from Marketing Ideas For Printers. Flexible Pricing Summary: Gone are the three incremental levels of bundles (the Start, Grow, and Conquer bundles). In their place are bundles designed to serve specific purposes. This new pricing structure will take effect for existing customers on January 1, 2018. We’re telling you now, so you have plenty of time to find the right combination of add-ons that work for you. And, if you don’t make any changes by January 1, that’s no problem; we’ll just roll over your current add-ons into the new pricing plan at that time. However, the transition to this flexible pricing also coincides with some other important changes, so you’ll want to keep reading to see how these changes affect you. A Time-Sensitive DesignEdit Upgrade Offer Summary:

Consumer Reports, Printer@Work, Websites, Marketing Ideas For Printers

We received notification from one of our content partners, alerting us of their decision to discontinue distribution of twice-weekly content from Consumer Reports. For you, that means the Consumer Reports content that is linked to your Printer@Work email newsletter will be phased out. Here are some dates for you to be aware of: The last Consumer Reports content that will be published to your website will appear September 6, 2017. The last issue of Printer@Work that links to that Consumer Reports content on your website (including all archived content) will be delivered September 19, 2017. Future issues (delivered after September 19, 2017) will no longer link to the Consumer Reports content on your website. The archived content will be available on your website through September 29, 2017. Even though Consumer Reports is making an exit, your subscribers will continue to enjoy articles and cartoons from Close to Home, Bottom Liners, Non-Sequitur, Focus on the Family, and this gem from Moderately Confused:

We’d like to bring you with us to Print ’17 this year! After all, we’re already offering you a free hotel room while you’re there! Bringing you with us might not be as glamorous as it sounds, but you can still come away with some big wins by participating in these two easy-to-win contests! Contest 1: Be Featured on Our Brochure and Receive a $350 Credit to Your MI4P Account The last time we printed our brochures, the cover looked like the photo below, featuring a picture of the Heidelberg SM52 press from the Mike Stevens / Express Press era of our company: This year we thought, “Why not consider featuring one of our customers on the cover?” If you and your team are willing to make an appearance on our brochure cover and we select the winning photo from your photo submissions, we’ll reward you with a $350 credit to your account with Marketing Ideas For Printers. Requirements for the photos you submit: Photos must be high-resolution, professional-quality photography. We’re looking for an authentic photo taken by someone with a knowledge of photographic lighting and an eye for great composition. You must be willing to give us the copyright release (assigning

Rackspace, our email technology partner, has been working through a disruption in service since yesterday morning (July 13th, 2017) making it a tough couple of days for a lot of you, and for us, too. Email is like oxygen these days, and we want you to know that we are right here with you in this and are feeling the frustration right alongside you. We partner with Rackspace for our email server because they’re the best, most reliable solution 99.9% of the time. Right now, though, we’re experiencing the other 0.1% of the time as they sort through issues with the email server. Typically, these interruptions of service are little blips that are resolved quickly, however, this one seems to be a big one. Rackspace is currently working hard to fix this problem, and we are hoping it will be up and running again soon. If you’d like to keep an eye on the progress Rackspace is making, you can take a look at their real-time updates on their status update page. We wish we could offer more information as to when the issue will be resolved, but currently, we are passing along as much as we know from Rackspace.

We’ll be traveling to Chicago this September to take part in the Print 17 conference, and we want you with us! If you’ve never had the opportunity to attend “the largest gathering of print and graphic communications buyers, decision makers and suppliers in North America,” here’s your chance! The Print 17 Conference is coming this September 10-14th, 2017, to McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois. We’ll be at the conference in Booth 351, ready to visit with you, and we’d love for you to join us! If you’re thinking, “what’s the big deal?” here are five reasons why you should attend and meet us there: 1) Learn What’s Hot See what’s new in the printing industry! You’ll walk away from the conference with an excellent grasp on the latest trends and innovations, and be able to bring yourself up-to-date if you haven’t made it out of the shop in a while. 2) Flirt With New Ideas Discover your next great idea in an environment that inspires creativity. Whether you’re looking for new products or ideas to overcome business challenges, or simply seeking knowledge to increase your productivity and efficiency, you’ll find that your experience and participation in the show will have an

Each week we present two webinars to talk about Odyssey, the new Print MIS from Marketing Ideas For Printers. Last week’s webinar was one of the best because Cindy Heitman and Don Jones joined me. (That means you don’t have to listen to me drone on and on!) Cindy and Don both have a unique perspective on Odyssey, and you’ll find it helpful to learn more about Odyssey from a different viewpoint. Cindy is on our sales team and helps printers see the benefits Odyssey offers. Don is Odyssey’s lead developer and shares his excitement of Odyssey from the perspective of all the technical details that make it work. A New Print MIS: The Odyssey Live Event Web Meeting Enough of my words, let’s get you watching and listening. Here’s a recording of the Thursday, March 16, 2017, Odyssey webinar: Table of Contents Miss a spot? Here’s a convenient table of contents for you to get to the exact right place, along with links to pages referenced in the webinar: 0:45 – Book: The Influence of “Hooked” on Odyssey (Blog post: http://on.mi4p.com/hooked-blog) 3:55 – Odyssey from Cindy’s Perspective 8:53 – Meet Don Jones (Blog post: http://on.mi4p.com/meet-don-jones) 9:22 – Odyssey from Don’s Perspective 12:40 – Demo of

Odyssey, MIS, Marketing Ideas For Printers, How Do I Know You're Print MIS Will Be Around

For those discovering Odyssey (our new Print MIS) and learning about Marketing Ideas For Printers for the very first time, it’s not surprising to have questions like this: How do I know Marketing Ideas For Printers will be around for the long haul? How can I be assured that Odyssey will be viable in the future if I choose Odyssey as my Print MIS? Those are good questions, and not too difficult to answer. It Starts with Our History The answer actually starts in the late 1980s with the birth of Ink Inc., which at that time was the name of the company that started the direct mail service provided by Marketing Ideas For Printers. Just click the history link at the bottom of any page on our Direct Mail For Printers website and you’ll see the story of how Ink Inc. began. Over time, we’ve added Websites For Printers (2001), Social Media Marketing For Printers (2009), and Email Marketing For Printers (2009) to the services offered by Marketing Ideas For Printers. Each service was quickly embraced by both new and existing customers, and each service quickly achieved sustained profitability. Each service has stood the test of time, and each service has adapted to continue to be relevant.

Websites, Features, Updates, Marketing Ideas For Printers,Experience A Performance Evolution

Fluidity. It’s our business. After all, how useful would it be to use yesterday’s technology and service experience for tomorrow’s needs? It’s in that spirit we wish to share six recent feature updates we’ve made to the websites from Marketing Ideas For Printers. With these updates, you can now: Complete/Re-open Individual Jobs Create Custom Send-A-File Questions Place Entire Order Level Tracking Numbers Edit Help Center FAQs Submit Partial Orders Use Product Category External Links To dig into the details of these features, it may be a bit of heavy reading if you don’t already have a website with us. But, if you’re interested in learning what we’ve been up to, keep reading. 1. Complete/Re-open Individual Jobs With this feature, your customers won’t have to wonder where their orders are. You have complete control over your workflow and can communicate on the fly to let your customers know exactly where in the production process their orders are. Once an order has been marked as completed, your customers can even place a quick and convenient re-order for that job. Need to make an update after a job has been closed? We’ve got your covered! Just re-open the job ticket and you’ll be

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!

We are looking forward to beginning a new year with not just one, but two new looks! Our Coffee Break and FastStart direct-mail packages have undergone a makeover, and both have fresh new contemporary looks. You have come to rely on our Dingbat/Coffee Break package to deliver humor and unveil interesting dates in history ever since 1989. Along with that, our FastStart postcard/mailer has offered the timeless message of “we’re a printer and here is what we print” since 1993. With 27 years of proven results, it’d be easy to think “why fix what’s not broken?” Well, with anything we offer to help you sell more printing, we want to be constantly looking for ways to do things even better and keep you current and in touch with your customer base. So, are you excited to see what’s in the future for these two popular offerings? Coffee Break Keeps Your Customers Smiling! Dingbat/Coffee Break will now simply be known as Coffee Break. The Dingbat name originated by playing off of the font name Zapf Dingbat. That font name might not be as recognizable these days, and we feel that Coffee Break better reflects the purpose of the content, to grab a