Web-to-print has also been through the phase of adoption of new technology by end-customers and those who are in the printing business.

 

Luckily, W2P has crossed the chasm - a phase of transition from early adopters to early majority in technology adoption cycle. Web-to-print has been implemented by many print service providers but to increase the ROI, it’s more important to let your customers and internal stakeholders must be well-versed with technology. Customers and the internal team both are equally important for high ROI of W2P investments. With more customers becoming friendly with new technology, its ROI will increase and the team members will serve as internal brand ambassadors for your business.

 

There are many critical success factors in the adoption of web-to-print and gaining high returns on investment for businesses. To list them; Customer awareness, Deriving go-to-market strategy, Staff training and Pilot run. 

 

Customer Awareness
There’s a famous quote from the movie The Field of Dreams – “If you build it, they will come” and it is often associated with W2P marketing and ROI. Things have changed and, now, you need to market and create awareness about your services. You need to give your customers a strong incentive to come to you with a perfect marketing plan and by educating clients about its benefits. 

 

Web to Print solution providers also offer with some of the promotional and marketing tools       such as offer discounts and promotions, newsletters, blog and RSS feed, social media sharing buttons, SEO-friendly website URLs etc. Thus, W2P adopters can use them to educate about the technology and its adoption.

 

W2P offers a range of benefits for customers but they need to be educated about their printing job. This becomes easy for the service providers.  With advantages of easy online job submission, online designing, template creation and saving them for later use, helps in reducing time and saving cost. With live pricing and quote, there’s no need to follow up with printers for job quotation. With live preview and proof-reading options, it’s easy to finalise designs and get approvals. As the job is submitted by the customer, there are little chances of unexpected delays and errors on the printers’ side.

 

Customer awareness about all these benefits multiplies the effect of W2P implementation; directly reflecting results on the ROI.

 

Deriving Go-to-Market strategy

Though the go-to-market strategy can be clubbed with marketing and customer awareness, it needs to be focussed upon separately. The go-to-market strategy can be successful only when the internal team has adopted the technology and they are convinced about its high returns. Based on customer profile, their requirements, challenges in adopting new technology, one can derive the strategy and expect more customer awareness and ROI.

 

 

Education and training of the staff members

Printing used to be a manual industry. Now, web-to-print has digitised the whole industry. With automation and fast production, costs of labour and manual work have been reduced to a great extent. There are fewer chances of error at printing workshops, the re-printing has reduced, there is no proofing and tracking shipping details online.

 

But only implementing web-to-print will not give optimised results. One needs to educate the staff about the benefits of this technology via user guidelines, workshops, training and other suitable mediums. Once the staff accommodates this technology, it will increase your ROI by leaps and bounds.

 

Training the staff is equally crucial. With the training, the staff is ready with new processes, products, technology, and changes inthe space. They can better convince the customers about the product and service on offer. 

 

The W2P solution providers can be your training partners about its working and processes. A good solution provider will extend support throughout your association with them, thus making the transformation easy for your staff. 

 

Pilot run 

It’s an easy option of calculating or estimating ROI with few customers on pilot basis. If things are not perfectly right, changes can be done before rolling it out into the market. This can be a point of cross-check and involves customer from the stage of product development, giving them a higher sense of brand association and more reasons to be loyal. 

 

With these reasons of building high ROI for any brand, two of our clients, Almamater and Barproducts, need to be mentioned here. 

 

almamaterstore.in is a renowned name in the field of personalised school and college apparels, uniforms and other accessories. Before using the web-to-print service, the Almamater team used to spend most of its time and money into designing services for customers. They implemented the W2P software and started creating customer awareness. Within a short period of time, their design costs reduced by 50% with doubled sales.

 

As customers became more aware about the advantages of the W2P design tool, they started using it for placing orders and this worked for Almamater. Thus, customer awareness is crucial in increasing ROI for Web-to-Print solutions.

 

barproducts.com is also one such client, who witnessed upstick in term of ROI by using product personalisation design tool and W2P solution. Barproducts offers services of DIY personalised gifts, customised wedding favours, bar supplies, event memorabilia; custom shot glasses and custom coffee mugs. 

 

After failing with their first W2P solution provider, they shifted to Design’N’Buy web to print solution and migrated from flash to non-flash based design studio built on HTML5. There were many hiccups during the migration process. Later, with staff training and pilot run, the implementation was successful. They have seen a steady growth in the number of website footfalls and order since then. 

 

Nidhi Agarwal is CEO and Co-founder of Design’N’Buy. Agarwal has got instrumental expertise in design and engineering, sales and business development and looks after the entire product development division for Design’N’Buy. She has been an expert in the field of software solution for printing business and has worked with clients all over the world giving her exposure to different aspects of the printing business.