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

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,

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