How Web to Print Helps Commercial Printers Improve Customer Retention
What’s more important for commercial printers: customer acquisition or customer retention? Both are essential, but one gets a lot more focus when it comes to discussions of best business practices and the newest technologies. Customer acquisition is, of course, a huge part of the job for commercial printers today. But it is becoming increasingly important to spend as much time thinking about what you do to retain and develop long-lasting relationships with your customers.
I say “increasingly important” because as competition for the biggest, most fruitful enterprise clients increases, printers today are relying more and more on the stability of cornerstone clients that they can count on.
Web-to-print is a huge component of a modern printer’s strategy for keeping those big clients engaged, happy, and reliable. Not only that, but with the right web-to-print strategy and technology in place, you can use your platform to win more of your current clients’ marketing spend and encourage them to try new products and services that you offer over time.
So, let’s talk about the link about web-to-print and customer retention and how to make the most of it.
How Web to Print Improves Customer Retention
There is no complicated process or unintuitive trick to the connection between web-to-print and customer retention. In fact, it can be summed up best with two simple statements:
- Web-to-print improves customer retention by making your clients’ jobs easier.
- Once your clients are used to your platform, it becomes a part of their marketing ecosystem.
That’s it. Improving customer retention with web-to-print is a two-step process that consists of solving your client’s pain points and then making it easier to do all their business through your platform than looking elsewhere.
This gets to the core of why web to print was invented in the first place. Strip away everything that modern web to print has become: the supply chain management features to reduce touch points and eliminate bottlenecks, the advancements in analytics and inventory tracking, forecasting, and accuracy. All of that is great, but at its core, web to print was invented to give printers a way to interact with their customers digitally and bring 21st-century technological convenience to the way clients buy print.
How Web to Print Makes Your Clients’ Jobs Easier
So now that we’ve established what your web to print platform must do to improve customer retention, let’s talk about the how.
And when it comes to B2B enterprise clients, generally when we talk about making the client’s job easier, we’re talking about the marketers and salespeople in the organization. They are the people who will be interacting with your platform daily.
So, to sufficiently improve customer retention, your web to print platform must make the marketer’s job easier by:
- Saving time
- Ensuring brand compliance
- Protecting the budget
Of the three, saving time is arguably the most essential. From the perspective of a marketer, the most obvious appeal of partnering with a provider who uses a modern web to print platform is having 24/7, on-demand, self-service online access to their entire marketing catalog.
Browse, customize, order, repeat. Compared to the old ways of doing things, web to print is a revolution in convenience, speed, and user experience. This is true for all print buyers, but for large, enterprise brands, it’s everything. These enterprise members want to buy things at their own pace whenever they have time and require a system that is flexible enough to enable them to do business their way.
The old processes for customizing artwork, getting it proofed, getting the proof approved by management, checking the status of their order, processing reorders, etc. was cumbersome at best and actively affecting their bottom line at worst. Web to print makes every step of the process so efficient and streamlined that it hardly seems like a process anymore. The goal is to be as convenient for your B2B customers as ordering through Amazon is for the average individual.
Protecting the Brand and Budget
Big brands and enterprise clients have a unique challenge when it comes to the distribution of marketing materials. With the large scale of their operations comes a harder time keeping brand compliance and budgets under tight control. These organizations have people at many levels, across many locations and branches needing to buy print and other marketing materials. Some of these purchases will be small orders, some will be in bulk. All these orders need to meet the requirements of the company’s specific brand guidelines, approval hierarchies, and business rules.
That requires business planning and organization which can be a lot of work to manage. A powerful web to print platform addresses every single one of these issues and more for the marketer and the sales teams of these organizations.
Smart personalization engines can do all the heavy lifting of both allowing users the freedom to personalize their products while locking down the aspects crucial to brand guidelines. Advanced approval workflows can ensure that each order is efficiently checked and approved by only those who need to see it. Granular user controls can make it so that users can be grouped and categorized according to their access level. This will determine what they can see, what they can order, what they can edit, how much they can spend, and more.
When all of this comes together, it can transform the way marketers and those in charge of the brand do their jobs and get their materials distributed. Once your client is fully immersed in the workflows of your web to print platform, that becomes a very “sticky” solution. The online storefront you have created for them becomes an extension of their operations. That is a true customer retention strategy.
