How a Web-to-Print Solution Can Make This Holiday Season Merry and Bright
While a holiday postcard or greeting card is a great way to express gratitude to a customer for a productive business relationship, too many B2B cards of this nature are mass produced and impersonal. A big reason for that is the time and cost required to create something unique and personal, but these challenges shouldn’t keep organizations from using the end of the year to create a positive brand touchpoint. Imagine there was a way to overcome these challenges by:
- Designing a unique holiday card using a variety of templates, enabling your employees to use their own messaging or images to create a personalized touchpoint with each customer
- Streamlining the design, pre-production, and print processes so that a custom holiday project can be executed quickly, efficiently, and in a cost-effective manner
Well, imagine no more, because a web-to-print platform can help your sales and account management teams create custom holiday cards — and even package them with gifts for key accounts — easily and quickly.
First, let’s define web-to-print, and then we’ll look at a couple of ways that an internal web-to-print platform can help you create a fun, festive greeting that makes this holiday season merry and bright for your customers — and increases brand loyalty for you.
What is a web-to-print platform?
A web-to-print solution is a branded, online storefront that allows you to upload, house, edit, and manage any number of print templates so that those with access can order them via print-on-demand (POD) technology. From business cards and sales collateral to postcards and holiday cards, a web-to-print solution helps your team personalize pre-approved, branded templates with images and tailored messaging using variable data printing (VDP).
Plus, the POD technology associated with web-to-print helps control costs by eliminating the waste commonly associated with larger print runs. The centralized nature of a web-to-print user interface makes it easy for you to make global changes to templates as needed, and it also helps optimize your version control processes to ensure brand consistency and overall quality of the final product.
Plus, because you can curate and customize your online storefront with branded items like coffee mugs or keychains, it’s quick and easy for your teams to pair tailored messaging with a small gift to take the impact of your holiday greeting up a notch.
What are the benefits of a web-to-print solution for holiday cards?
Designing and printing holiday cards takes time, and time is the most precious resource companies have, especially for outfits in the retail and hospitality industries, where surges in demand are part and parcel of the holiday season. This is where your own web-to-print platform like OnSpark can help you navigate the challenges of getting holiday cards to your customers, especially when it comes to:
- Personalized messaging on a large scale: For sales teams with a large client base, web-to-print can utilize variable data printing (VDP) and images to create custom messaging with your customer’s first name and last name, but you can also take things one step further by including products or services they’ve purchased or other customer lifecycle milestones, as long as the data lives in your CRM. Plus, your sales team can also get creative and add their headshots, contact information, or even their own personal holiday messaging.
- Asset management for superior consistency: One of the biggest challenges in executing a print project is keeping track of the visual assets necessary — not to mention any variable imagery you may want to use. A web-to-print platform allows you to organize all corporate-approved and branded visual assets in one place to make brand consistency easy and transparent.
- Simplifying the print process: Not only can a web-to-print solution make it easy to prepare files for print and troubleshoot any potential issues BEFORE the project is printed, our web-to-print platform simplifies the printing process in order to take your holiday card from print-ready file to completed piece in just a matter of clicks. OnSpark can also help you select the right mailing or distribution package to ensure your cards, brochures, or swag hit the right mailbox at the right time.
- Saving time and money: With a web-to-print partner, gone are the days of wasted time, money, and resources in trying to nail the right number of print materials for the right number of people. POD technology and its ability to create quality, consistent, and accurate print runs means you don’t have to worry about where to store surplus pieces because there won’t be any, thus reducing your print costs.
Want to talk with our team about how OnSpark can help with your holiday cards this season? Request a demo.