Boosting Web-to-Print Utilization Rates
So, you took the plunge, upgraded to a new web-to-print solution, and created a portal for a large client. Great! Now what? It’s easy when in the weeds of research, demos, and portal implementation to forget that the work isn’t over once you’ve got a storefront online.
Modern web-to-print solutions are incredible tools for printers to leverage sales, win larger accounts, and create stronger partnerships with clients. But once you’ve got the sale, it’s important to be proactive about helping your customer get usage rates up. Utilization rates are a key factor in measuring the success of your web-to-print program. As portal utilization rates go up, so does sales volume. And, critically, so does the reliability of future sales.
There are 3 big factors you can actively affect to increase web-to-print portal utilization: user communication, user experience improvements, and incentivization tactics. Or more simply:
- Communication
- User Experience
- Incentivization
Let’s break all 3 down.
Communication: Keeping Users Engaged
The earlier you can get your client and the necessary people on their team trained and prepared to start using their portal, the easier it will be get them to use it. Once the decision to create a portal for a client is made, it’s time to get organized.
You want to have a very good understanding of the portal roll-out process and you want to keep the client informed about what to expect and when. Give them a roadmap to launch day and make it very clear what you need from them to get there. This means asking questions about who the administrators will be, how many users do they anticipate, where the users access the portal, what types of products, what needs to be templatized, and so on.
After the portal launch, focus on giving your client the tools they need to keep their users informed about what’s on the portal and how to make the most of it. This ongoing education is crucial to building the habits that create a long-lasting and lucrative partnership.
Some web-to-print solutions offer a host of features centered around user communication that can help increase utilization rates. For example, Propago has features such as:
In Stock Alerts: This feature mimics a common trait found on e-commerce sites. If a product is out-of-stock, all a user has to do is click the Notify Me button and they’ll receive an email once they can order the product again.
User Comm. Campaigns: This is a feature-rich internal email service that portal admins can use to make announcements, encourage users to place orders, and more. Clients can design and send emails to targeted groups of portal users.
User Experience: Simplify, Simplify, Simplify
This factor should be self-evident. The easier your web-to-print portals are to navigate, the sooner your clients’ users will become accustomed to using them. You want it to be so easy to go from login to order confirmed that using your portal is the quickest task of their day.
This is how your solution become “sticky” with clients. The marketing portal becomes an integral part of their workflow and you develop a long-lasting relationship with the client as a result. Then, they start to do more business with you as you introduce new tools and value adds. It starts with the user experience.
So what can you do to enhance user experience? That’s a question that deserves its own post. But here are a few ideas:
Skins/Themes: The closer you can get your client’s portal to look and feel like their brand and internal sites, the better. It may seem subtle but having a consistent look really does make for a smoother experience.
Order History: Ordering marketing materials isn’t exactly like shopping for clothes. A lot of the time these users are going to be making similar or identical purchases for things like flyers, stationary, and business cards. Having access to their order history and being able to re-order things with a click just makes sense.
Auto-Fill: One signature feature of the Propago Platform is centralizing data so that the software does as much of the heavy lifting as possible. That means when a user clicks Personalize on a business card, the system will pull their info and automatically preview a proof without the user having to key in anything.
Incentivization: Drawing Them In
Incentivization, the simplest way to get people to do what you want. Solid user experience and consistent communication are absolutely necessary for sustained and rising utilization rates. But incentivization can’t be overlooked, especially for that initial push to get users flocking to the portal.
What does incentivization of your marketing portal look like? It can be as simple as giving new employees a $100 credit to get orders in for company gear. Maybe your web-to-print solution has a store credit system that clients can use to give users a regular stipend. Maybe that credit system can get granular, so only certain types of users can spend pre-paid store credits on only certain types of products. While they’re shopping, they might add other products to their order that they need to spend extra on.
This is all based on tried and true principles of sales that work just as well on private storefronts as they do on B2C e-commerce sites. Try experimenting with promo codes, cross-selling, and bulk order price breaks to optimize your order volume. The Propago Platform has a unique feature called Offers which is designed to help you maximize user engagement and order volume.
Propago Offers can be used to create an “all for one, one for all” event where the more people who order, the more everyone benefits. This helps clients drum up orders for a group of products quickly.
An Offer is essentially Propago’s version of a group-buy. You can create a product collection that automatically puts all orders on hold. When the Offer ends, either manually or after the deadline, all the orders are pushed to their respective workflows.
The incentivization aspect of Offers is the group price aggregation. This means everyone buying into the Offer is working together to unlock lower pricing on items with price breaks.
As you can see, there are many ways that printers can work to increase their web-to-print order volume and marketing portal utilization rates. Of course, how much of this you can accomplish is limited by how modern and feature-full your web-to-print solution is. That is always going to be one of the biggest factors of your web-to-print success. But even the most advanced web-to-print solutions on the market are not set-it-and-forget-it sales tools. It takes a holistic approach: keeping your users informed on portal updates, improving the user experience, and incentivizing higher order volumes.
