Are You Fully Utilizing Web-to-Print? Part 1

How do you think about your printed documents? Design them, contact a printer, figure out how many you can afford to print in order to keep the price down, then hope you didn’t order too many? Balance the quality and run length requirements against your turnaround? It’s the way designers, agencies and marketers have done it for decades. But today’s Web-to-print (W2P) technology enables you to do much more.

We’re not just talking about printing in shorter runs, on demand, although that’s part of it. We’re talking about revamping the way you think about and manage your marketing collateral, forms and documents, and print marketing projects. We’re talking about changing the way you approach branding, personalization and multi-channel marketing.

These aren’t yesterday’s Web-to-print solutions. This is a new crop of solutions that is increasingly flexible, increasingly open and designed to handle the wide range of workflows and design and marketing needs that marketers, creatives, and printers face in today’s complex, multi-channel world.

“Web-to-Print: Transforming Document Management and Marketing,” a training and educational report from Digital Printing Reports, divides Web-to-print into seven primary marketing categories in widespread use today: short-run printing and versioning, customized marketing collateral, one-off, personalized follow-ups; user-generated personalization and fulfillment; 1:1 print personalization; publishing; and advertising repurposing. Let’s take a short look at each category to get a sense for just how powerful a marketing—not just production—solution Web-to-print has become.

Short-Run Printing & Versioning: Printing in short runs isn’t just a production solution. It’s a marketing solution. After all, the ability to break down a 10,000 run into four 2,500 runs targeted to key demographics is a marketing goldmine.

Customized Marketing Collateral With Centralized, Online Control: Marketers can give third parties such as distributors, retailers and independent agents access to branded templates for marketing documents that they can customize or personalize to their individual customer bases—making these contacts more relevant and effective. Because the headquarters is able to maintain centralized control of images, marketing copy, pricing, logos,and other components, this lets the company offer decentralized marketing flexibility while maintaining full control over its brand. Plus, if the marketer changes its promotions, updates a product image or tweaks its logo, this change takes effect immediately across the entire organization. No mess-ups with old information.

One-Off, Personalized Follow-Ups: Say a prospect comes in to test drive a car or select furniture and leaves without making a purchase. If the salesperson takes the prospect’s name and address, he can input their information into a Web-to-print application, along with the details of the car they drove or the furniture they viewed, and the system will automatically generate and mail a personalized brochure reminding them of their visit (and often providing some kind of incentive) within 24–48 hours. No surprise, this type of application consistently generates strong results.

User-Generated Personalization & Fulfillment: Increasingly, marketers are allowing users to personalize their own information brochures from Web sites. This application was popularized a few years ago with the “build your own car” brochures from Buick, but is becoming increasingly popular in other verticals, such as higher education. Students, for example, access the college or university Web site, then build their own informational brochures tailored to their exact interests and needs. At Huntington College, its automated response system acquires more newly enrolled students than any other source.