One of the most common questions in Web-to-Print is, “Does web-to-print still matter?”
Let us ask ourselves a series of better questions:
– Are customer’s preferences moving towards or away from self-service?
– Are more & more businesses moving online?
– Do customers want you to solve a wider or narrower set of challenges for them?
– Do customers want to increase or decrease the number of vendor relationships they maintain?
– Is mobile becoming more or less important as a channel?
– Do your customers need more or less reporting on the effectiveness of their communications?
– Are people more or less busy or are they understaffed?
– Are digital communication methods replacing print communication methods?
– Is it more effective to market to customers communicating across multiple mediums like print, online, e-mail, promotional products and live events?
– Is printing easier to buy than digital communication options or is it harder to buy?
Hopefully the 10 questions listed above can be easily answered by anyone reading this and who is experienced in photo books or web-to-print. The answers to these questions make web-to-print more important than ever to our industry, to your business, and most importantly to your customers.
So here’s the problem. The wide definition of web-to-print in the print industry is too narrow. It still impacts a very small number of order volumes, and for the most part is focused way too much on the printer and not nearly enough on the customer.
Web-to-print isn’t about you as a print house. Web-to-print or a Photo book Solution is a product for your customers. Don’t buy a web-to-print system based on what it will do for you; only purchase a web-to-print system based on what it will do for your current customers and how it will help you gain new customers. The most common way how an analysis or competitive mapping is done is by having lots of feature spreadsheets produced with hundreds of software features listed. And in many of them 80% of the web-to-print features are for the printer, 20% are for the customer.
Web-to-print is a new front door to your business. For many companies that have started in the last 10 years, web-to-print is the ONLY door to their business. Your online presence needs to match or exceed your offline presence because more and more, first impressions are going to be online.
Increasingly photo book or web-to-print software is becoming the differentiating tool for the print-house. Here we are not talking about proprietary software; we are referring to how your business buys, implements, and leverages software to gain a competitive advantage. There have been cases where two companies buy the same web-to-print software, one was phenomenally successful, the other a complete failure. The difference lies in the amount of control over your success with print software than any vendor, consultant, or channel partner.
Web-to-print matters, your online presence matters, your differentiation should be that you have mastered the ability to communicate on behalf of your customers across ALL CHANNELS. Physical mediums do matter, but they cannot continue to be sold with too much customer burden. The digital future is a brilliantly easy self-service for designing and online purchasing for more and more complex products and services. And Print is no exception to this.
In order to differentiate amongst your competitors & edge ahead, choose our World-class Web-to-Print solution – Pixopa Web-to-Print which is based on the HTML5 & Magento Ecommerce platform. With close to 40+ customers globally and an array of advanced features, Pixopa is the solution that will suffice your customer’s requirements.