Search me! How to get your print online – magazine article
In Australia and New Zealand, the most significant, profitable and dynamic technology to hit the printing industry in decades is being largely ignored or, at best, half-heartedly undertaken with a degree of reluctance or even incompetence.
I’m talking about the marketing of printing services online and by that I don’t mean ‘having a website’ or ‘accepting PDF files over the internet via ftp’. Marketing is a whole-souled approach to growing a business by establishing firm bonds between buyer and seller - a relationship no less. One of the most powerful aspects of customer relationship-building is convenience, as every mass merchandiser knows.
To put it into the 70s lyrics of the Crosby, Stills and Nash hit, ‘Love the one you’re with’:
There’s a rose in a fisted glove
And the eagle flies with the dove,
And if you can’t be with the one you love
Love the one you’re with.
Online print marketing is like that rose in the fisted glove, delivering bouquets to hundreds of thousands of willing print buyers globally, elegant but powerful and ready to strike swiftly at any markets that doubt its strength. It’s convenient and potentially in every customer’s face 24 hours a day.
If you can’t buy print from the printer you know and love, buy it from the one you’re with. Online.
Take a look at this Vista
Let me tell you about the latest results from a ‘dot.com.au’ online printing company. These are real figures.
To put it into the 70s lyrics of the Crosby, Stills and Nash hit, ‘Love the one you’re with’:Curious? Go to www.vistaprint.com.au and you will get a taste of what a 100 per cent online printing enterprise can achieve. But where is VistaPrint based? It doesn’t matter; they run 18 websites with local tags - .au, .uk, .whatever. This style of online marketing reflects the global village like no other. And their average order value is just $40 plus delivery.
VistaPrint founder Robert S Keane, 44, started out as a Microsoft Publisher consultant developer following a Harvard BA (Econ) and MBA from prestigious Fontainebleau, France. It was in France where he started VistaPaper – a programme for MS Publisher complete with matching papers that enabled template-driven business cards and other printed products to be produced by SOHO businesses.
Keane realised the big money was in producing an end-product and so Vistapaper became VistaPrint in 2000 and was listed on the NASDAQ exchange in 2005. Its model is fundamentally to deliver long-run, high-end printing economics to short-run W2P printing. Put simply, most printers have a high cost of sales and low profit margin. VistaPrint has a very low cost of sales and high profit margin. Its patented e-commerce software is highly automated and therefore has the minimum of human intervention. Average order processing time is 16 seconds.
Your design or ours
Customers can use existing templates or upload their own designs. Once an order is placed, a sophisticated cross-selling and up-selling process begins which invites the customer to use the same design, say for business cards, on stick-notes, calendars etc. Offers are emailed regularly to customers with incentives, discounts, coupons that expire in 24 hours etc.
As if it matters, production is based in Canada and The Netherlands with corporate HQ in Boston MA and company registration – where else – in Bermuda. VistaPrint runs a very lean CIM manufacturing operation with MAN Roland B1 offset presses, HP Indigo digital and what MAN Roland themselves describe as the most integrated, automated workflow anywhere in the world. They employ around 700 people and in six years have grown from 500 customers to over 8 million.
I tried VistaPrint… for free. Yes, they give away business cards and charge only for delivery. Once I had decided on the rose pattern for my free 250 business cards, I was lured with offers on matching sticky notes, letterheads and so on. I chose ‘slow’ delivery for $10 over the $25 ‘fast’ delivery. At time of writing, I’m still awaiting delivery but it was an easy, non-technical process that, unlike the Worldwide Online Printing and other sites, does not require the downloading of InDesign or Quark templates.
Who’s making Google eyes at me?
One quick way of seeing who is up to what online is to run a Google search. Google is more than a search engine; it’s a marketing tool as you can pay for sponsored links and ‘Adwords’ that place your website higher up the search results for a variety of searches. How do Australian and New Zealand printers fare in this test?
The .au search I used was ‘Buy business cards online’ + printing and here’s what I found - the top five (results will change from hour-to-hour depending on Google).
#1 in the links is…. VistaPrint.com.au We know about them.
#2 is Martinprint.com.au; a nice website that also offers a host of other printed items. This Perth-based printer has obviously embraced online print marketing globally, with a focus on good design. It’s more of a personal service than VistaPrint but this in turn will mean a higher cost of sale. Nevertheless, WA is once again showing the rest of the country how it’s done.
# 3 is Dynamite Express cards of Dandenong, Victoria. Initially a good-looking website but requires member log-in and tries to educate people in what printing is. Trust me, buyers don’t give a rat’s bum and also, they don’t need to ‘log in’ to visit a Kwik Kopy or Snap, so why should they to shop with you online? However, 10/10 for promoting environmentally sound printing online.
# 4 is shopsafe.com.au– a general online shopping site with business printing as just one category. Guess who the link in that category is? Martin Print. I’m beginning to admire those Perth guys even more. Martin has learned the secret of affiliate click-through online marketing.
#5 is clickbusinesscards.com.au with a snappy website from this Hornsby, NSW-based printer. They are attacking the NZ, USA and UK markets with gusto, well done.
Changing the search to ‘buy printing online’ brings up a couple more local websites such as cmykonline.com.au and weprintit.com.au– a network of six print sites in NSW, Queensland, Victoria and WA. At number 5 using this search is none other than Print 21 online! No, we’re not selling print but if you want Pantone…. A little further down is my own company,
Graysonline
for buying and selling used equipment. There are very few proper printing firms, and none of the recognised big players in the industry. Even printing.com, the UK-based franchise system taken up by New Zealand’s PrintStop does not figure. Quite extraordinary.
The message appears to be that the major part of the Australian-New Zealand printing industry is ignoring online print marketing at their peril. The ones that are engaged in it are probably printers first and online marketers second; their models are nowhere near as sophisticated as VistaPrint’s.
The secret to success online
Online print marketing is not about using the internet as another advertising or awareness tool. Most printers’ websites are just that – their Yellow Pages ad budget and content transferred to the ‘net. Web-to-print (W2P) is more than that.
The secret is to view your website/s as shops – places where commerce can take place instantly. This requires a lot of work and investment in servers, bandwidth and software ‘store fronts’. But it’s all out there for you and will cost much, much less than a new press – and deliver more profit. EFI has Digital Storefront, Xerox its Freeflow together with iWay from Pressense. Kodak has built Web-to-Print into its Prinergy workflow offerings.
I work with a company that is now almost 100 per cent online in the way it transacts business. Graysonline has held its last traditional auction in ‘rooms’. Our customers can inspect assets wherever they are located, but all bidding is now online and we are growing at a phenomenal rate with customers all over the world.
Marketing print services online can deliver the same kind of result to those who would step back and embrace change. Learn to be internet-savvy first and a printer second; or hire the twenty-something IT geeks who can make it work for you.
Things to remember online
If all this is too hard for you, consider affiliate marketing with VistaPrint by placing their link on your website – they will pay you $4 for every order generated, 24-hours a day, anywhere in the world.
The power of the rose in the fisted glove – online print marketing – has hardly begun; it’s a good time to make a start before it becomes a thorn in your side.
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