Are you looking to reduce business printing costs?
Whether it be leaflets, flyers, business cards or letterheads, print media is still an important part of many businesses marketing strategies. However, it’s important to reduce business printing costs for a multitude of reasons.
Studies have found that 56 percent of customers believe print to be the most credible type of marketing. Whilst digital marketing is on the rise, it’s important to remember that in order to gain the trust of consumers, you need to be creating a mixed marketing campaign.
As marketing becomes more complex, and expensive, for the business owner, it’s great to save money wherever you can.
Below, we outline our 10 top tips to help you reduce business printing costs.
1. Only print what is necessary
Whilst it may sound obvious, many companies fall into the trap of printing large quantities of marketing materials before assessing what they actually need. This results in wastage and stockpiling that can easily be avoided. When it comes to marketing materials – printing fewer items each time allows you to capitalise on a campaign and change it for your next print run, making your marketing strategy flexible and efficient. You can also use a web-to-print and stock management system. Our software takes out all the hassle and allows our customers to massively speed up the process. Remember, print has a shelf life. Although printing another 500 items may only cost a fraction more, will you use them, or will they simply sit around gathering dust?
2. Find the right print company
Finding the right print house to manage all of your marketing materials is vital, and it’s really worth shopping around. Look for a printing company that works with clients and businesses similar to your own, so that they’ll be familiar with the type of work you are after.
3. Batch print jobs to save money
It’s well worth keeping all your printing under one roof in order to reduce business printing costs. As well as offering lower rates for valued customers, many print houses will give you a reduced price per unit when you print larger quantities of each piece of collateral. Bare this in mind when budgeting and planning your printing for all marketing materials, and make sure you speak to your account manager to find out what they can do for you.
4. Think about document design
As well as considering the design elements of each of your pieces of marketing collateral, it’s also very important to consider size and layout of the finished piece. Make sure you check which sizes are cheaper for the print house to reproduce – it doesn’t always follow that smaller paper size equals cheaper to print. It’s also worth thinking about whether you will want to printing on one side, or double sided, which immediately bumps up the costs. The number of folds in a leaflet can also affect the price. Although tri-fold leaflets are popular and look nice, they are pricier to print.
5. Be efficient with your colour use
Creating full colour artwork is the most cost effective way to print. With the developments of lithographic printing and digital printing technology, it is no longer cost effective for a printer to wash down and create separate printing plates for an individual colour. Spot colours are generally classed as specialist processes these days so if you want to reduce business printing costs then stick to CMYK.
6. Keep your data cleansed
If you are planning to do large direct mail-outs of printed materials, you want to make sure your data is as accurate as possible before going ahead and ordering your printing. This will significantly reduce the number of items returned to sender.
7. Use segmentation
Using customer insights to segment your audience will ensure your mailings go to the right people. Make sure you target mailings to audiences who are most likely to respond to this kind of marketing, don’t waste valuable resources on people who will just throw it into the bin.
8. Choose your paper wisely
Think about your paper quality. Whilst a thick high-gloss finish may look great – is it really necessary? As your print needs get larger, reduce the weight and finish of your paper to massively reduce business printing costs. But bear in mind that this may have an effect on the overall feel your print gives to a potential customer, so it’s important to weigh up the saving compared to the impression you wish to convey.
9. Keep page counts for documents low
Whilst printing more units will result in a reduction in cost per unit, if the original document has more pages, the base price per unit will be higher. So the optimum would be to have a large print job of a document with less pages. Think about this in all your writing – especially for lengthy reports. Not only will you massively reduce business printing costs, your readers will ultimately thank you for it.
10. Keep in-house printing to a minimum
You will inevitably have some documents which need printing in the office, but it’s worth setting guidelines in place to ensure that printing is kept to a minimum. Encourage people to email where possible and proof on the screen before printing anything out, this way you lessen the impact of an office printer on your business purse strings.
Whilst a paperless office may seem appealing, for many consumers print is still just as important, and you will never completely eradicate printing costs. By following these 10 points you should be able to reduce business printing costs whilst also seeing a higher return on your investment.
We’ve done the research so you don’t have to:
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10 Print Marketing Statistics You Should Know – DMR Sats