Sift Through the Options —Sherbrune

I HAVE written quite often in this space about the role of “product” in the overall marketing strategy for any company; that is, the physical product or service offered to the customer. There are many exciting new products and services that printers are offering to their customers these days that go beyond print to address a broader swath of the business objectives their customers are trying to achieve.

This includes multi-channel communications—incorporating e-mail, PDF distribution, Web, personalized URLs/Web microsites and other communications alternatives along with a print campaign; variable data solutions; transpromotional communications or the use of what is being called “onserts” in place of inserts to communicate promotional offers with transactional documents such as statements and notifications; and Web-to-print services that make it easier for customers to order (and reorder) printed and non-printed materials.

Other services like mailing and warehouse/fulfillment services are also being offered by many printers. And industry leaders back this up with a good infrastructure, including print MIS for access to real-time business data that makes smart and timely decision-making easier.

Value-Added Grows Profit

These so-called value-added or ancillary services are a viable option for growing revenue and profits. But, sometimes, sifting through the options and trying to figure out how to afford the required investments—or even determining what investments to make—can be confusing and even a bit intimidating, especially for smaller, resource-constrained firms. But the sifting must be done and, ultimately, investments must be made to ensure a viable firm moving into the future.

I recently attended the 2008 On Demand Conference & Expo in Boston, and I saw a theme emerging that can go a long way toward making these decisions easier.

While many suppliers to the industry have focused on larger firms as they develop offerings and bring products to market, a growing number of those suppliers now seem to be scaling down solutions to meet the needs of smaller shops.

It is true that there has long been a range of solutions targeted at smaller printers, but a good question to ask any supplier is how scalable are these solutions as your firm grows. If you outgrow an entry-level solution, do you have to then start over with something entirely new or is there a built-in migration path? That is where I am seeing significant movement on the part of suppliers.

This focus on ease-of-entry and scalability includes such things as:

• A choice between hosted and licensed software operating models, with the ability to easily and cost-effectively migrate between the two. Clearly, a hosted approach to offering Web-to-print services, as an example, means less upfront investment in hardware, software and internal IT capabilities, and the ability to operate in a more pay-as-you-go model. A few years ago, this was an either/or choice with many suppliers. They either offered a hosted solution, or they didn’t.

Increasingly, suppliers are offering a choice and making it easier to migrate from one to another. This is an important development that allows printers to add these services with significantly less financial and operational risk. Examples of this approach include EFI’s Digital Storefront and Press-sense iWay.

• A modular approach to implementation. In this case, suppliers seem to be more aggressively modularizing their solutions, so customers can pick and choose the modules that are most important to them, keeping initial costs down and minimizing implementation challenges. With a modular approach, new functions and capabilities can easily be added as needs and requirements change. Many MIS and Web-to-print solutions, for example, can be purchased modularly.

• A small business or scaled down version of solutions previously targeted at larger enterprises that have a clear migration path to the full version—which is what many suppliers are now offering. Examples include Elixir Opus SMB and RSA’s WebCRD Base.

In this approach, offerings are scaled down in terms of the number of users, the variety of output data streams supported, the automation levels of production workflow, etc.

Ease of Entry-Level

They feature an attractive, entry-level price for a robust set of capabilities. If you then outgrow the entry-level offering, a simple software key upgrade can turn on additional seats, output streams, increased automation or other functions you may need as you grow.

Here’s one example. Transpromotional printing, or TransPromo, is an application that may seem out of reach to the small printer. Most, if not all, of the success stories that have been publicized come from large providers, which are producing millions of TransPromo statements every month.

They often require complex integration with enterprise systems and use high-speed production devices that cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. No wonder many smaller printers feel TransPromo is a business opportunity that is out of their reach or not relevant to their businesses!

But consider this: Almost every customer has some sort of billing process, information about their customers and cross-selling/cross-marketing opportunities that they are not currently taking advantage of. By front-ending RISO’s HC 5500 ink-jet printer (120 ppm; approximately $45,000 or $1,000/month on a lease) with Elixir’s Opus SMB ($25,000), you can set yourself up to produce TransPromo statements for those customers with only a few hundred or a few thousand statements per month. Elixir also offers Web-based training, which eliminates the need for costly travel or time away from the office.

One of the key messages I got from On Demand is this: Advanced value-added services are within reach for businesses of any size. Take a good look at your business. Talk to your customers. And then take advantage of the state of the industry to breathe new life into your business and your customer relationships.

Hey! You could even convert your own invoices to TransPromo. What a great marketing tool! PI

—Cary Sherburne

About the Author
Cary Sherburne is a well-known journalist, author and strategic marketing consultant working primarily with the printing and publishing industry. She is a frequent speaker at industry events, a regular contributor to printing industry publications and has written three books, which are available for purchase through the Bookstore section on Printing Impressions’ Website (www.piworld.com). Sherburne can be contacted at Cary@SherburneAssociates.com.