7 Good Reasons to Implement, or Enhance Existing, Web-to-Print Solutions

There's no question that, to be successful in today's world, more and more commercial printers offer digital storefront and online ordering capabilities to their customers. This is especially true if their clientele consists of franchises with multiple locations, organizations with field offices, as well as the broad spectrum of buyers seeking to place orders for personalized items on-demand through a Web interface. Sophistication levels of what printers offer can range from basic off-the-shelf software packages to highly customized and sophisticated, in-house developed solutions.

Not only does online digital storefront and online ordering capabilities make doing business with your printing establishment more user-friendly, it also helps you improve your internal processes by creating more automated and streamlined digital printing workflows. That translates into fewer internal human touch points and, hence, higher profit margins. It also helps lay the groundwork for you to be able to promote other value-added services to customers and creates more "stickiness" so they don't take their business elsewhere.

Cloud-based marketing asset management software supplier Propago provided the following list of seven helpful reasons and recommendations for launching a Web-to-print solution:

1. Become a one-stop-shop for a brand's entire marketing supply chain. Print shops need to move beyond an order at a time. By adopting Web-to-print, printers can support their customers throughout the entire process and determine exactly what is needed, where it goes and how much is spent. When a brand needs additional brochures for a hot-selling product, a printer can quickly provide that branded collateral by easily ordering through the printer’s storefront.

2. Grow your business beyond print. Yes, print is the cornerstone of any printer’s business. But by implementing a Web-to-print solution, printers are seeing a doubling or even tripling of their annual sales. Extra revenue can come from fulfillment, personalized products, on-demand marketing and gifts.

3. Increase your bottom line with recurring revenue. It’s not enough any more to take individual orders to sustain your printing business. Many successful printers have already formed partnerships with loyal customers for recurring orders. Having a Web-to-print storefront, however, provides easy access for your brand customers to set up ongoing print orders and allows you to capture growth opportunities such as personalized publishing or transactional marketing.

4. Engage marketers with a sales pitch that hits all the right notes. Your customers want to know how you can create value for them. Invite them to visit your facility, show them how your marketing platform can simplify their marketing tasks, see your new presses in action and meet your employees. Let them know that you want to form a partnership with them and give them control of their designs, products and scheduling.

5. Prove that personalized marketing is more important than ever. It’s no secret that personalized products yield results. With major advances in printing technology, such as production inkjet, printers are able to improve their print capabilities with personalized and customized communications across a variety of high-value applications.

6. Give your clients complete control over their brand, budget and inventory. Web-to-print’s major advantage is the simplicity it brings to the ordering process. It enables brands to generate business during off hours, efficiently order and re-order customized and personalized print products, ensure brand control and expand market reach.

7. Web-to-print works the way your customers want. Your clients want to automate how marketing materials are distributed to their sales reps, affiliates, partners and staff in various field offices. Web-to-print brings simplicity to the ordering process. It gives your customers the ability to manage their print procurement system with complete access to the controls.

Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Propago was started within a large commercial printing conglomerate as an internal application to serve clients and support backend operations for those customers. Propago gradually matured over the years to become a comprehensive marketing management and fulfillment platform. In 2015, the team responsible for building and maintaining the platform was given the opportunity to spin the technology away from the parent company and form a completely standalone organization.