It is an exciting journey to go online using a (good) Web-to-Print System. Web-to-Print offers you a lot of opportunities, and by making small changes in your marketing strategy, you can reap maximum benefits for your organization. Marketing strategy covers Segmentation, Targeting, and Position, as well as the Marketing Mix, i.e., Product, Price, Place, Promotion (People, Process, and Physical Evidence).
Segmentation & Targeting
Till now, you must be catering to a specific segment of customers limited to a specific geographical area. As geography limits the total number of customers you may serve, you had to print a wider product portfolio (yourself) to generate more business. But with Web-to-Print, you may target a segment which is product wise more focused, and geographically wider. This gives you an opportunity to be a specialist in certain products you choose and still enjoy economies of scale.
New geographies also mean new cultures that may introduce you to more affluent customers, new events that require printing, more corporate customers and their wider requirements, more languages you may print in, and many more. You may explore more and more segments, and target the most suitable to you.
Positioning
Positioning is the image of your organization that you want to create in customers’ mind. When you go online with Web-to-Print, you have an opportunity to strengthen your positioning as:
– a progressive organization, moving ahead with time and embracing new technology.
– a customer centric organization, providing comfort of online ordering to customers.
– fast and smart organization, by reducing turn-around-time of order to delivery.
Also take care that on your Web-to-Print store, you promise what you deliver, and you deliver what you promise. Don’t try to position yourself as an omni-printer; being focused is a better strategy while going online.
Product
You may make following changes in your product, once you go online using Web-to-Print:
– You may choose to focus on lesser products, and be a specialist in them.
– On the contrary, you may expand your portfolio to include many more products that you might not even print, using dropshipping. It is easy to manage a large number of products and orders using a good Web-to-Print system, hence you can add lot many products. It is easy to add and manage dropshipper / vendors and transfer orders to them in a Web-to-Print system, hence you can add lot many dropshippers for any no. of products you want.
Price
Pricing is the most advantageous part of using a Web-to-Print system. You may make following changes to reap its benefits:
– Providing quantity discount is easy with a Web-to-Print system. You can create simple tiers for each product, and fix different price for each of them. You may utilize this facility to provide quantity discounts to your valuable customers, and strengthen the relationship.
– Creating and managing promotions is very easy with a good Web-to-Print system. Now you don’t need to stick to that same-price-all-the-time pricing policy at all, and you can delight your customers with promotions and offers round-the-year.
Place and Promotion
Place refers to providing the product at a place where it is convenient for consumers to access. You’ll say that you’ve already made your products accessible to customers around the world using Web-to-Print platform, and that should be enough. Not exactly! Customers don’t visit all the online stores that are there. If they are purchasing for the first time, they google it, and open all links on page 1 (at the most page2). If they have already purchased before, they have their list of 5 (at max 10) Web-to-Print Stores, which they will access. So, just being online doesn’t necessarily mean your web-to-print store is where your customer is.
You need to be in that list of 5 to 10 favorite web-to-print stores of customer. And to enter this list, you need to be at top of search results for the products you print. This takes you to changing of promotion strategy – to focus on Search Engine Optimization, bring your Web-to-Print site up in search results. To add content, keywords, meta tags, descriptions, create links, use social networking, and do all the stuff that brings your ranking up (ethically). Slowly, you move up in the results, and then more customers start clicking you, and moving you further up.
Apart from that, in all your printed and other promotions, you must provide your URL, and ensure that customers visit your store. Some Sales Promotion at initial stage helps you grab those early visitors to Web-to-Print store. Provide those discounts, some freebies, and other promotions that bring in more traffic to your store.
People
People are the most important part of your print delivery cycle. Your team needs to adapt to the new system, learn new technology, analyze and check designs submitted by your customer on your Web-to-Print storefront, talk to her for any corrections, send them for printing, print shipping labels, paste them on packet, ship it, and most importantly, update status on all these steps so that customer can know where his order is. All this, your team will be doing for the first time. This might be a big change for people who, till now were hardly updating any status.
Web-to-Print brings in a lot of new customers, and also a lot of those who may have many questions. Your customer service team needs to be trained in handling these queries properly so that the customer gets the solution and comes back to buy more too.
Process
It is the process that makes Web-to-Print a big advantage for you. In an offline system, you need a designer to design every requirement of customer, show him proofs, make changes as per his requirements, and print. Even for corporate customers, you need to engage a designer to change petty things like Name, Designation, and Contact No. of every new employee for whom you are printing business cards.
With a good Web-to-Print system, you may smartly delegate these small tasks to your customers. They can themselves create designs in an online design studio, or use a template and change simple fields like, name, designation, address, etc, or fully customize it in design studio, and they will enjoy that too.
Now you need designer to create templates which can be personalized and customized easily. Utilize his experience and creativity to create thousands of templates, which customers can’t resist buying.
Physical Evidence
It is the beauty of going online using a good Web-to-Print platform; you eliminate this element of marketing mix to a great extent, and bring down the cost. No need to create dazzling front offices with heavy illumination and exquisite furniture, your team doesn’t need to wear uniforms, no big signboards required. All you need to concentrate on what you do the best – print and deliver. With that you may improve more on another kind of Physical Evidence elements – printing itself and the packaging. Invest more in it, so that best-quality printed material is delivered in most elegant and safe package.
Make these changes in your marketing strategy, and you will be able to reap great benefits from your Web-to-Print store. Happy Printing, Happy Selling!