Production Inkjet: Work It Baby-Mary Schilling

By Mary Schilling

When evaluating inkjet equipment remember to look outside of your normal book of business. Or, if you already own production inkjet and need to fill press time with nice value-added business, there are areas of printing which you can incorporate into your offerings that will demand a higher price. The key is to look at printing that is designed with a marketing strategy beneficial to your customer—customized, personalized and low run. High-speed production inkjet has changed the old sales model of “sell quantity,” to “sell quality” messaging. Your sales staff should be creating relationships, and helping customers create a customized marketing message throughout their printing.  

Here are a few ideas, that with a little planning, can help you develop a robust marketing message for your customer while creating repeat business for your inkjet device:

Personalized Calendars: Although doing one-off calendars of bad holiday photos is nice (and amusing), there is real money to be made when having your sales staff approach local businesses. Creating a marketing plan that outlines their products for the entire year and printing it in calendar form will create a sales platform for your customers each month. Most local stores keep track of what their customers buy, so why not use that data to create personalized calendars that feature the products they buy the most with a coupon that they can use each month. Once the calendars are printed, punching and wire bounding is quick and simple. Jewelry stores are a great place to start. There are some great treated and coated papers available that will give the printed calendars the high-print quality needed for such images.

Customized Notebooks: If you have any kind of book binding, this one should be a no brainer. Approaching schools, trade organizations, convention centers and hotels—which are always promoting their establishment, products and services—is a good place to start. In the case of hotels and convention centers, having a resource for customized “business” oriented give-aways is a win. Talk to your customers about cross advertising and how selling space within such books is a good way for their schools and businesses to offset their printing costs. The key is to approach this concept with a well established marketing plan that will help your customer and make it easy to incorporate into their structure. Choose treated or coated stocks that have a structure like 116 to 200 gsm weights for the cover, and uncoated or treated (depending on print quality requirements) in 90 gsm for the book body.

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Mary Schilling Author's page Mary Schilling works with all the elements of the digital process-from conventional and inkjet technologies to fluids and substrates-and provides technical support to print providers on optimizing print quality while lowering total print cost. Understanding the dynamics of the digital marketplace, and the incredible growth and advancements in inkjet technology, Mary provides customers with print quality, color gamut, fluid consumption, machine and print quality analysis, utilizing G7 methodology. She also works with inkjet fluid and machine developers to align paper development of new, innovative inkjet substrates. As the owner of Schilling Inkjet Consulting, she consults with fluid and inkjet machinery suppliers and end users on how to improve color and print quality for paper, plastics, metal, fabric and glass with UV, solvent and aqueous inkjet fluids. Mary received Innovator of the Year awards from the Flexographic Technical Association and from Xplor International for her efforts in closing the gap between document printing and digital packaging. She is G7 certified and a member of the IDEAlliance Print Properties Committee.