Written by Gordon Kaye
Editor, Graphic Design Magazine USA Magazine

I recently had the opportunity to participate in a Google+ Hangout on the future of print design and the value of design in business. Xerox was the host and sponsor, appropriate because it has long been an advocate for print and Xerox products have done so much to advance the graphic arts industry. Google+ Hangouts are an interesting new option for meetings; I found the technology reasonably easy to adapt to, and it invites a relaxed and informal give and take. My sense is that the camera put about 10 years on me – maybe twenty. Just kidding. I can’t blame Google for the extra years, though I would if I could.

The heart of our hangout was an exploration of the myth that “print is dead.” Luckily, our magazine, Graphic Design USA, has been polling on this issue for half a century, and had just completed our 50^th annual survey on just this topic. So I was loaded with rebuttal information. And, luckily, no one loves the feel and smell of a printed piece more than me.

The conclusion we reached during the Hangout is simple but profound: print is unique and powerful because you can touch and feel and hold it. Print creates a human connection missing from the ephemeral and desensitizing media world of digital communications. Designers value print for its classic strengths – tangibility, sensuality, permanence. The good and great designers know how and when to employ these traits to advance a message, a brand, an emotion, an idea, a cause, a sense of authenticity. That is the fundamental take-away; all the rest is but a footnote.

That said we collectively managed to mine several other nuggets about the strength and prospects of print. Among them:

• Print is practical. It is portable, convenient, accessible, easy to read, unplugged, it goes anywhere.
• Print is crucial to how designers make a living. 93 percent of designers work in print as part of their mix, and 75 percent of their time is spent on print-related work.
• Print is a team player. Print may no longer be the superstar, but it is an excellent complement and collaborator, a vital component in the marketing mix. From print to inbound telephony, or online to direct mail, print drives and motivates consumers.
• Print is getting smarter. New technologies to customize, personalize, sharpen, target, interact and integrate are wringing out the waste and infusing responsiveness.
• Print is novel. As the digital deluge, the online onslaught builds; print will be even more effective because it is fresh, rare, different, and welcome.
• Print is sustainable. I hate the canard that print is dirty and digital is clean. I ran out of time to harangue the Hangout audience on this point so let me do it now. Print and paper are becoming “greener” and more transparent up and down the supply chain; the online world should only be as honest about its energy use and other sustainability issues.

GDUSA has been conducting our Print Design survey for 50 years. So let me close with a question. What do you think designers will be saying about the role of print 5, 10 or even 50 years from now?

Interested in other topics similar to the practicality of print, its many benefits, and its future? Check out:

• Enduring #PowerofPrint: How Print Stays Relevant in a Digital World
• Promoting Value of Print: Communication that is Environmentally and Socially Responsible
• Optimism about the Future of Print Highlighted by Printers in Survey
• A trip to Dusseldorf paints a global picture for the future of print

–
Gordon Kaye is editor and publisher of Graphic Design USA magazine. He joined GDUSA in 1990 after a first career as communications lawyer for a private law firm and then for the NBC Television Network where assignments included NBC News and Saturday Night Live. He received a BA from Hamilton College, and a joint degree in law and public policy from Princeton University and Columbia Law School. Gordon lives in New York City with his wife Susan and has two daughters, Sasha and Charlotte.

Contact: editorial@gdusa.com

Written by Chris Irick
Worldwide Marketing Manager, Xerox Corporation

Xerox DocuColor 8080 Digital Press

Whether you are a seasoned digital print provider or new to the world of digital print after making the leap from offset lithography – one thing remains constant: your customers of today and tomorrow have choices. To remain competitive and capture their business, you must stay on the cusp of the latest technology and provide customers and prospects with a compelling reason to choose your offerings. What sets your business apart? Is it print quality, outstanding service, a wide gamut of substrate offerings, the fastest turnaround times in town, web-to-print capabilities, or variable data services? What about expanding your business’ offerings by becoming a one-stop service provider to your clients?

In an early 2013 PrintWeek feature, the Staffordshire-based British printer, KJB, shared their experience of this first-hand when they decided that the £1,000 worth of work per month they were outsourcing to local digital printers warranted a conversation of acquiring a digital press of their own. This was completely unchartered waters for KJB, who in their twenty-year history had owned nothing but offset lithographic presses. Commercial Director, Stephen Egerton, described the need to venture into digital offerings as one that would allow the company to “better serve the clients we had and also to expand that list of clients.” KJB began a rigorous search for the right digital press for their business, and found many advantageous offerings with the Xerox DocuColor 8080 Digital Press, including the ability to produce 80 A4 pages per minute at a resolution of 2,400dpi, and auto duplex capabilities at rated speeds on all weights and sizes up to 300gsm.

Quality-driven automation is also a key component of the DocuColor 8080, as its Automated Color Quality Suite helps to streamline automation within your print shop. This is done by delivering excellent color quality that is consistent and repeatable; reducing operator intervention and increasing uptime through auto calibration, advanced profiling and spot color calibration. While KJB initially began by just producing the £1,000 worth of jobs they had previously been outsourcing, the company slowly began moving some of the shorter-run offset jobs onto the DocuColor 8080, opening the company to new growth opportunities. They slowly began to see a steady increase in the usage of their digital press – from three hours a day, to five hours a day – making way to the now daily 10 hours of print runs that have become commonplace – with roughly 300,000 impressions per month. Egerton states that quality has been the key differentiator, as it has “meant existing customers have increased their work with us and have kept coming back. It has also meant we have won work from the customers of print shops with older digital gear, looking for the highest quality possible.”

With the addition of their new Xerox DocuColor 8080, KJB was able to grow their business by expanding their offerings to clients. How do you differentiate your print business? Is it through superior print quality, streamlined automation, or the ability to deliver a wide range of specialty substrates to clients such as polyester, vellum, magnet, NeverTear and vinyl?

Interested more posts related to delivering value to your customers? You may also like:

• How do I Market Better and Offer Marketing Services?
• Productivity and Versatility: Meet the New Xerox J75 and C75 Color Presses
• You Don’t Have to Become a Marketing Services Provider to Offer Marketing Services
• Tough Questions about the PSP-MSP Evolution
• Business Development: Everything you Need to Grow your Digital Printing Business

–
Visit Xerox.com to see how the Xerox DocuColor 8080 can help you grow your business, reduce costs through automation and expand your offerings  – delivering a commanding ROI to your business

Written by Bill Michael
eMarketing Manager, Xerox Corporation

You may have noticed that print has been capturing it’s fair share of media attention as of late, mostly in regards to mail delivery (in light of a February announcement that the US Postal Service will end Saturday delivery, beginning in August), as well as the protection of select printed statements/communications (with a new Congressional resolution seeking to reverse recent federal initiatives to completely eliminate paper-based government information, such as earning statements and income tax forms). Call me a traditionalist, but I still prefer to receive my statements and transactional communications in print form. This is likely due to a combination of things:

• Fearfulness of forgetting to make a payment without the physical prompt a printed statement delivers
• Not wanting to add to my collection of usernames and passwords I have registered across a few handfuls of websites (and then straining to remember my log-in credentials)
• An excuse to re-familiarize myself with an experience that doesn’t involve an electronic device and a screen

And I know I’m not alone in feeling this way. Post & Parcel recently reported results to a survey showing that while over 75% of consumers can view their bank accounts online, over 85% elect to continue receiving statements by mail. Last year, the USPS released a statement citing that transactional statements are “opened more than 95% of the time and, on average, the receiver spends two to three minutes with each piece”. It’s clear that consumers value their transactional mail. Phoenix Marketing International reported that 73% of all bills and statements are still sent by mail, and according to PayItGreen, the average household receives approximately 19 printed bills and statements each month. Nineteen! With roughly 30% of the American population-alone without Internet access, printed communications and statements, specifically those of the TransPromo or transactional-promotional breed, represent huge opportunities for those involved.

And for advertisers and printers, this is likely music to their ears. But let’s be clear about something – when we say TransPromo, we aren’t talking about the stand-alone filler inserts that accompany a transactional statement, fall out of the envelop as you are pulling out your bill, and eventually end up in the trash. We are talking about utilization of a client’s ever-precious consumer data to deliver targeted, personalized, and relevant promotional information and offers that are integrated directly onto the transactional statement –  engaging the recipient and creating a higher likelihood that an action is taken. The service provider sending the TransPromo statement can either occupy the promotional space for their own advertising purposes (promoting a new reward program, CRM marketing strategy, and/or attempting to up-sell or cross-sell products/services) or sell the advertising space to outside companies who can target specific consumers with targeted, personalized messaging. Either way, the promotional opportunities and endless and can serve as a huge revenue-generator.

The benefits for all involved are very clear, and can be illustrated through the work former Best-of-the-Best winner Telemail, S.L. provided Iberia – Spain’s largest air transport group and one of the 10 largest airline businesses in the world. In this case, Iberia offered passengers credit cards that allowed them to earn frequent flyer points, while boosting the company’s bottom line. The monthly statements were printed in mass quantities through offset printing and later variable information was introduced through a separate digital print run. This created excessive waste, limited opportunities to offer personalized and targeted promotional messaging, and became a costly nightmare when trying to pair the multiple promotional inserts to the individual recipients.

By taking advantage of the TransPromo model, Telemail was able to provide Iberia with a fully integrated solution printed on their Xerox 980 Color Continuous Feed System. This solution reduced production costs by 30% for Iberia as their statements were now printed in a single run, ensuring document integrated was 100% accurate. By integrating the promotional content directly onto the statement, Iberia’s mailing required fewer inserts and thus lower mailing costs. In addition, Iberia was the beneficiary of increased revenue from 3^rd party advertisers as a result of the ability to include more targeted promotional content.

The TransPromo space is alive and well – are you taking advantage? How do you view the potential opportunities made available through providing TransPromo offerings?

Interested in learning more about the TransPromo opportunities? You may want to check out:

• Printed Customer Communications – Marketing Opportunity or Inconvenience?
• Digital Printing Cuts Soaring Coast of Monthly Statement by 30% for Global Airline
• Optimism about the Future of Print Highlighted by Printers in Survey
• Radical Redesign of Bond Statements Generates Flood of New Business

–
Are you a member of the Xerox Premier Partner Global Network? Don’t miss out on your chance for international recognition! There’s still time to enter your best print work into the Xerox Best-of-the-Best Contest – but hurry, entries close at 11:59pm EST on April 3, 2013!

Written by Bill Michael
eMarketing Manager, Xerox Corporation

Here in the United States, we have this phenomenon known as the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. March Madness. The Big Dance. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? It overtakes schools, media, and the workplace, turning even the casual sports fan into a hyper-enthusiast.

In the spirit of the NCAA Basketball Tournament, we put together a fun little bracket of our own for the digital print industry, complete with a collection of digital print success stories going head-to-head in regions such as Books/Manuals, Direct Marketing, Packaging, and Transactional/Promotional. Much like the actual tournament itself, this field serves as a good comparison to see what strategies the industry is employing, how they’ve found value in doing so, and how you can implement those successes into your everyday business. And while this is obviously a theoretical simulation, it begs the question: Which success stories do you see coming out of each region?

Books/Manuals Region
The Books/Manuals region takes place in both static and personalized form, and competes in formats such as magazines, coffee table editions, booklets and combinations of offset and digital.

Participants in the field include:

• A printer who was able to exceed customer’s expectations by turning around dissertation books with incredibly short notice and below budget, resulting in a strong customer relationship and an increase in their book production volume of 300% for the following year.

• A 100% variable magazine, with 60 pages of content tailored to each individual reader, providing better definition of segments, and thus greater demand from advertisers. Targeted advertisements saw 256% more leads than static advertisements.

Direct Marketing Region
The highly competitive and metric-focused Direct Marketing region includes participants in the client-focused and self-promotional spaces, and contains the gamut from print-exclusive offerings to cross-media approaches with technologies such as PURLs and QR Codes.

Participants in the field include:

• A self-promotional cross-media campaign to generate awareness among customers and prospects of new technology offerings, resulting in a 17% response rate, 11.5% registration rate, and 68.5% conversion rate.
• A cross-media campaign that helped a university quadruple applicants and double enrollment over previous year, with 29% of recipients visiting their PURL. Even better was the final cost, which was 10% lower than the static campaign produced the previous year.

Packaging Region
Participants of the Packaging region include B2C and B2B offerings, relying on competitive advantages such as short-run capabilities, quick turnaround times, and highly-personalized output achieved through web-to-print solutions.

Participants in the field include:

• Personalized, on-demand digital packaging solution for Microsoft, reducing production time from 20 days to 72 hours, eliminating obsolescence, and providing unique anti-counterfeiting capabilities.
• A fully customized chocolate packaging solution, leveraging a web-to-print structure and producing over 11,000 boxes during a single Christmas season – generating over $100,000 for the printer.

Transactional/Promotional Region
The Transactional/Promotional region takes place in many venues, including industries such as airline, telecommunications, financial, and health services with participants boasting integration of relevant, personalized promotional messaging to complement transactional statements.

Participants in the field include:

• Printer who helped a credit union redesign their previous offset monthly account statement that was overprinted digitally with basic personal information. The newly redesigned statement eliminated warehouse costs, reduced mailing costs, decreased call-center volume, and allowed for highly-targeted promotional messaging.
• A frequent flyer member statement for a large airline had included very general promotional offers and were costly to produce. A printer helped redesign the statements using digital printing and variable data solutions, allowing the airline to include 20 different promotional messages and up to 200 variable images. The airline saw a 30% reduction in the cost to produce their statements.

Interested in other success stories? You may want to check out:

• How Wedding Invitations and Personalized Discount Codes Drove $2.5M in Revenue Growth for Printer
• Cross-Media Marketing Campaign Generates 10% Response, Draws Crowd and Nets New Business
• 3 Application Ideas for your Shop
• Stunning Digital Printing Showcase Helps Fuel 30% Growth for Printer

Written by Bill Michael
eMarketing Manager, Xerox Corporation

Your digital printing capabilities allow you to provide your customers with benefits such as quicker turnaround times, shorter-runs at lower costs, and value-added services such as variable data printing and personalization. In the process, you reap benefits such as elimination of warehousing costs and reduced waste. Your customers appreciate the low prices you offer to print their latest company collateral run of 200. They find it extremely useful that the hard proofs you send them are accurate and representative of their final product. And they’ve surely come to rely on your two-day (…and even as it makes you cringe, the sometimes same-day) turnaround that you’ve become known for. But how can you be sure that your customers of today and tomorrow know about your many other services and offerings? What better way to demonstrate these to your customers and prospects, first hand, than through a self-promotional direct marketing campaign!

In a prior blog post we discussed the importance of self-promo campaigns, but let’s take a look at how a 2011 Xerox Best-of-the-Best Winner, CopyCat AS of Norway, put their plan into action. Their direct marketing campaign promoted an upcoming open house event, showcasing their capabilities – trusted, true and new – and resulted in 20 orders from brand new customers.

When CopyCat purchased their new Xerox Color 1000 Press with clear dry ink capabilities, they wanted to not only spread the great news to customers and prospects, but also show them what this new technology could offer. Clear dry ink provided an almost limitless range of creative possibilities, allowing their customers’ printed images to pop off the page with selective spot or flood effects, creative patterns, and gloss marks. CopyCat wanted to invite customers and prospects to attend an upcoming open house event, giving them a chance to see their new technology and to meet their friendly staff.

CopyCat decided to show off their direct marketing capabilities by producing a cross-media invitation, complete with clear dry ink effects and a QR code taking recipients to their own personalized response webpage. By teaming up with local photographers, they were able to capture recipient attention by featuring provoking imagery. Photographers made up a portion of CopyCat’s customer base and prospect list, so the print quality and use of clear dry ink within the campaign really resonated with that audience. Personalization was integrated into each piece using XMPie uDirect, opening the minds of the many recipients to CopyCat’s direct marketing services that they were previously unaware of.

1,800 invitations were produced and sent, generating a response rate of over 10 percent and a conversion rate of 50% – filling CopyCat’s open house event. An additional 130 respondents that couldn’t attend the event requested more information on CopyCat’s business and services. Best of all, as a result of the convergence of this creative campaign with a tangible call to action and an appealing offer, CopyCat received 20 orders from brand new customers in the weeks following the event. The potential lifetime value of these new customers and the lasting impact it could have for CopyCat is something I’m sure they are very excited about.

Interested in more topics similar to direct marketing campaigns or success stories? You may want to check out:

• When it comes to Direct Marketing Campaigns: Practice what you Preach
• Cross-Media Marketing Campaign Generates 10% Response, Draws Crowd and Nets New Business
• 3 Application Ideas for your Shop
• Stunning Digital Printing Showcase Helps Fuel 30% Growth for Printer

–
Have a success story you’d like to share for international recognition? Are you a member of the Xerox Premier Partner Global Network? Enter into the Xerox Best-of-the-Best Contest today – entries close April 3, 2013!

Written by Bill Michael
eMarketing Manager
Xerox Corporation

With the snow beginning to melt and temperatures slowly starting to rise, Spring, believe it or not, is just around the corner (March 20, to be exact)! For many, this signals the start of wedding season. In fact, 28% of weddings in the United States take place in the spring, second only to summer (29.5%). Chances are you know of somebody getting married this year, and chances are some of your customers are seeking wedding card services. In the United States in 2011, wedding statistics show that the average number of guests in attendance was 141, and nearly $350 was spent on wedding invitations alone. Adding production capabilities of wedding cards to your list of services can be a very profitable venture. MagnetStreet, a Xerox Best-of-the-Best winner, proved just that by creating a portfolio book to house samples of their invitation cards, fueling over $2.5 million in revenue growth over a 12 month period. How’d they do it? Let’s take a look:

MagnetStreet had a long history of successfully offering customers save-the-date magnets and cards, but saw huge growth opportunities in the wedding invitation space. However, they needed a strategy to successfully bridge into this offering. They knew they had the attention of their customer once their save-the-date invitations were ordered and received. But simply accompanying a flyer or sell-sheet with the order wouldn’t be enough to turn a future sale. They needed a way to blow away the recipient. MagnetStreet created an Invitation LookBook, a portfolio book filled with examples of their invitation offerings. The book was produced mostly on an offset press, with all of the invitation cards and two pages of perforated color swatches printed on their Xerox iGen4 Press.

To drive response and encourage engagement, each book included a unique discount code that was created using Xerox FreeFlow Variable Information Suite and Xerox FreeFlow VIPP Pro Publisher. MagnetStreet could modify each variable offer and monitor to see which offers were driving the highest response. FreeFlow tools also offered built-in security, as each created discount code was unique and couldn’t be used more than once.

Couples fell in love with the quality of the wedding invitations, and MagnetStreet saw a huge boost to their bottom line. In fact, within one year, conversions of save-the-date customers to wedding invitation customers rose 56%. Within that same year, invitation orders increased by 103% and MagnetStreet saw their revenue grow by more than $2.5 million. MagnetStreet was the recipient of a Xerox Best-of-the-Best Award for their outstanding success.

Do you have a success story you’d like to share for international recognition? Are you a member of the Xerox Premier Partner Global Network? Enter into the Xerox Best-of-the-Best Contest today – entries close April 3, 2013!

Interested in more topics similar to photo specialty offerings or success stories? You may want to check out:

• Uncovering Opportunities within your Print Operation with Greeting Cards
• How the InterContinental Hotels Group Was Able to Cut through the Clutter
• Looking to Boost Awareness of your Company’s Capabilities and Attract New Customers? The Xerox Best-of-the-Best Program can Help!
• It’s the Most Wonderful Time of The Year…for Photo Publishing
• EU Services Creates Web-to-Print Variable Brochure for Sales Force

Written by Mary Roddy
Marketing Manager, Premier Partners Global Network
Xerox Corporation

Innovative personalized chocolate packaging that produces $100,000 in profit through a single holiday season, a direct marketing campaign that helps Mercedes-Benz UK achieve a 53:1 ROI, a wedding invitation book that helps drive over $2.5 million in revenue….what do all of these have in common? They are all previous winners of the Xerox Best-of-the-Best Program, a worldwide award contest, open exclusively to members of the Xerox Premier Partners Network.

This program draws participation from the most successful and innovative print shops across the globe, showcasing creativity and business impact using Xerox digital technology. In addition to recognition of great digital work by the graphic communications community, winners receive outstanding marketing and promotional opportunities. Each winning entrant is featured in a case study which can be used with customers and prospects, posted on the web, discussed in presentations, and as a proof point in email and direct marketing campaigns. Winners are showcased at regional, national, and international industry tradeshows/events and also in international press releases.

Today we’re announcing the 2013 Xerox Best-of-the-Best Program will open for entries on January 8, 2013. Members of the Premier Partners Network can submit their work in any of the following categories:

-Books
-Collateral (Web-to-Print)
-Digital and Offset
-Digital Packaging
-Direct Marketing
-Photo Publishing
-TransPromo

If you are a member of the Premier Partners Network –be sure to take advantage of this tremendous opportunity! On January 8th, visit the Best-of-the-Best website at www.xerox.com/bestofthebest to get started.

If you are not a member of the Xerox Premier Partners Network, visit the Premier Partners Portal today at www.xeroxpremierpartners.com to learn about the program and benefits members receive, and become a member!

You’ll want to hurry – this year’s Best-of-the-Best Contest closes April 3, 2013!