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Customer Retention For Printers, Marketing Ideas For Printers

Customer retention is the foundation of any business, including yours. If you want your print business to thrive, it’s essential that you have the tools available to your customers to easily order from you again and again. As the late American engineer, statistician, and business consultant William Edwards Deming once said, “Profit in business comes from repeat customers, customers that boast about your product or service, and that bring friends with them.” Are your print buyers boasting about ordering online with your company? If not, it’s time to consider tools that will propel you forward on your quest to instantly boost your customer retention. Laying the Foundation for Retention For printers, customer retention starts by finding ways to make yourself “sticky.” For your print buyers, sticky means they have: An easily accessible order history A no-fuss way to quickly reorder what they’re looking for Reduced decision making, not having to know all of the details because you (the printer) already have them stored with each product for reordering Here are three tools available to you that will help you create just the kind of “stickiness” you’re looking for. Check out the webinar below! Want more great tips like this? Sign up

“How do I get them coming back for more?” As a print owner, chances are that thought has rattled around your head more than once. Let’s face it, getting print buyers to order printing from you and then continue to order printing from you isn’t always easy. This is especially true when you consider how your competitors are just a click away screaming and flashing their wares as cheaper, better, more convenient, and any other flashy adjectives they can throw your way. But, don’t let that discourage you. You DO have some powerful weapons at your disposal. One of those heavy hitters is Private Label Websites. The Sticking Power of Private Label Websites By providing a custom, branded, print-buying experience for your corporate customers that they can then pass along to their print-buyers, you’ll create a steady inflow of print orders through your website. “I went from about twelve orders a month ten years ago to averaging 180-240 orders per month from online storefronts. Plus, 90% of the storefronts I’ve set up for customers have been used longer than eight years.” – Gary Chmielewski, Northern Ohio Printing What’s in it for You? As with anything in life, there is some effort required to

Sales can be a little like parenting. There’s love, hate (ok, dislike), joy, pain, and the very real possibility that you’ll pour everything you have into it and things still won’t turn out how you had planned. But, as with everything, that doesn’t mean your best course of action is to throw in the towel, give up, and hope for the best. Instead, you research, you learn how to make a better connection, you seek advice, and many of us straight up pray! There’s not much more we’ll offer when it comes to parenting, except as Red Green says, “Remember, I’m pullin’ for you. We’re all in this together.” When it comes to sales, however, here are a few tips to help you increase your chance of making a connection. You Scratch My Back. I’ll Scratch Yours. Sales are really just a simple exchange of goods. Sometimes you’re the giver, and sometimes you’re the receiver. If you give something, it’s human nature to expect something in return. If you receive something, you feel obliged to reciprocate. Many won’t admit it, but most of us have a mental tally going as to whether our next step with a particular person is

Making emotional connections with your customers and prospects can have a tremendous impact on your business. If your brand can generate an emotional response, you will sell more, gain greater customer loyalty, and be able to charge more than other companies that are selling an identical product. But, how do you do it? Using emotions in marketing is the latest topic covered in the White Paper Content provided by Marketing Ideas For Printers. “A brand that captures your mind gains behavior. A brand that captures your heart gains commitment.” – Scott Talgo Your Mission is Gaining Trust Emotional connection is the key to gaining and building trust. If your marketing fails to connect with your audience and make them feel something, you will be quickly forgotten. To create a connection, you first need to understand what’s motivating your buyers. What are they hoping to achieve? What feelings are they searching for with your product or service? Typically, there are three things that motivate all buyers: trust, confidence, and empathy. When you develop your message and brand to speak to one or all of these, you’ll have a message that sticks. Tools, such as targeting benefit triggers or choosing certain colors in

What makes a printed piece leap off a page? Some say it’s the dimensions of the designs, the vibrant hues of the ink, or the dazzling gloss finishes. But part of the beauty is the way the layout itself captures your eye. When white space is appropriately utilized (or eliminated completely), the contrast can be breathtaking. But often clients don’t understand the technical details of planning for appropriate margins, through the use of full or partial bleeds. A Common Mistake Worth Correcting One of the most frequent amateur design mistakes is allowing for insufficient bleeds before sending a project to print, causing the effectiveness of the design to be weakened or essential parts of the layout to be cut off unexpectedly. This month’s print tip, added to the Ideas Collection of every website provided by Marketing Ideas For Printers, coaches your clients on the basics of bleed techniques in print. The August print tip article trains your customers on eliminating unwanted white space and understanding trim and fold markings as you build a print proof together. Though today’s software offers default values for creating bleed margins, here are a few tips to coach clients on when to use them: Bleeds

The Golden Touch Do you have anyone in your life a bit like Midas? You know, where everything they touch turns to gold? It seems favor follows them at every turn and they garner respect wherever they go. While not all of us possess that charismatic charm, it is possible to grow in our delivery. And that starts with compelling communication. Creating the Framework for Ideas that Stick How is it that some people can share their ideas in a way that resonates so well with their audience, while others can drop a great idea that falls completely flat? This month’s marketing tip, available on every website provided by Marketing Ideas For Printers, offers your clients a framework for creating memorable, useful content for their flyers, business cards, banners, and more. This framework starts with five key questions: Does your content make people: Pay attention? Understand and remember it? Agree/Believe? Care? Be able to act on the message? Bringing in Emotion Businesses want people to remember the idea — so it’s essential to make it feel concrete. When readers care about an idea, they are one step closer to buying into the overall concept, and ideas become more “sticky.” Frame

While there are many powerful software suites available on the market today, few are as accomplished as Adobe InDesign. But with its large number of buttons and gadgets, this publishing software can be intimidating for novice designers. The June Ideas Collection tech tip, available on every website provided by Marketing Ideas For Printers, will walk your audience through six “best practices” for Adobe InDesign. Here are three points to preview from this month’s article: 1. Begin at the End Ever complete a design only to find you were missing proper fonts or that your images were improperly linked? InDesign offers “Live Preflight,” which allows clients to see problems with the file before it is sent for printing. 2. Thread That Text Often we get bogged down and frustrated by tasks that were supposed to be simple. Placing long blocks of text can be a headache, but InDesign allows users to “thread” text, flowing content from frame to frame. This allows for effortless changes to text boxes, layouts, and a more cohesive story that evenly breaks across pages. 3. Keep Formatting Consistent Even experienced designers can find their font, sizing, and colors losing consistency throughout a printed piece. InDesign overcomes this

Let’s be honest, sometimes entrepreneurs and small business owners just don’t know where to start with their print resources. They get their business cards, maybe a sign, some flyers and brochures and then they don’t know what else to do – or think they don’t really need anything else. The Tool You Need for Your Customers The Ultimate Print Guide for Running a Small Business is a compact and useful tool for understanding what new business owners need to market and run their business. It is the perfect guide for inspiring your customers and simplifying their print needs into something they can understand and get excited about. The Perfect Guide The guide covers everything from PR needs and traditional marketing materials to forms and employee manuals. The Set, Camera, Lights! section dissects the need for great images of products and what to consider if taking the photos themselves vs. having them professionally done or using stock photos. After all, nothing ruins a great flyer like an amateur photo. The section on direct mail and other direct marketing materials lays out a good foundation to increase exposure and sales in simple steps with the potential for big results. Combine that with the section

What scenes are so arresting you simply cannot look away? Peter Friederici of Orion magazine listed nine apprehending images including these: A single star shining through low clouds lit orange by the glow of streetlights. A ship interrupting the smooth expanse of any horizon . . . because a vessel on the water is a story whose arc you simply have to follow. How to “Lure” Your Audience Want to equip customers to apprehend viewers with their own arresting images? Sleek, compelling designs can make it difficult to look away! This month’s design tip, added to every website provided by Marketing Ideas For Printers, offers a few tricks for luring in viewers: “Good design understands that your eyes are sending information to your brain at an astounding rate. But because your brain cannot possibly capture every detail, sometimes it sees the edges of a particular image and fills in the missing pieces of the puzzle based on your previous life experience. By capitalizing on this thought, you can use clever design ideas that will gently encourage viewers to follow your lead.” Here are a few keys from the article to educate your clients: Fancy Brain Tricks Use optical illusions, colors,

Are your customers looking to make a splash with creative new approaches to printing? Perhaps they’d like to try intriguing designs that would traditionally be quite difficult or expensive. This month’s print tip, available on every website provided by Marketing Ideas For Printers, introduces your clients to some delicate aspects of overprinting, a marketable technique to your customers that can be used to blend colors, text, or layering to add dimension without busting the budget. Jump Right Off the Page In our April Ideas Collection, your customers will learn more about how overprinting adds depth, texture, or interesting detail. It will inform your readers on how traditional design software knocks out any text or line overlaps to avoid a muddy appearance and call attention to crisp edges in each printed product. But, they can use overprinting to bypass this default, adding breadth to visible edges. This slight trick of thickness can make their image appear to jump off the page, adding some zip and complexity of color. As you coach your clients on keys to overprinting, this tip will remind them that the order of coloring is foundational. If they’re overprinting several colors, for example, they wouldn’t want to design a project

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