Printing for Less

At Printing for Less, we've offered high quality online printing services since 1996. Shop business cards, booklets, stickers, and more!

Blog

Dimensional Mail Delivers Better Results

Dimensional Mail

Dimensional Mail Delivers Better Results. Imagine arriving home from work to find a package on your doorstep and an envelope in your mailbox. Which are you most excited about?

Packages generate excitement and anticipation. Packages, also called dimensional mail, can be anything from a box to a tube, or a cool gift inside of an oversized envelope. It’s got bulk, heft, and it stands out in a way that flat mail can’t.

The Numbers Behind Dimensional Mail

Statistics from the 2015 Direct Marketing Association (DMA) Response Rate Report show that dimensional mail campaigns can generate effective results. Of all the mailing options, dimensional mail had the best response rate for prospect mailing (5.3%).  When dimensional mail was used to specifically target business prospects, rates jumped to 12.7%.  

The ROI Argument

Dimensional mail costs more upfront but generates a larger return. Before sending dimensional mail, make a solid plan. Define early on what, where, to whom and the stage in the customer journey that you plan to send dimensional mail.

Even though postage cost increases with larger mail, dimensional pieces generate higher response rates. If you are concerned with price, check with the post office before you land on a particular box, tube, package, etc., to determine the most functional and affordable option.

Here are a few tips:

  • Standard mailing options can be less expensive than custom options but just as effective.
  • Dimensional mail as a first touch can be expensive, it may work better after you’ve engaged a bit with cheaper options.
  • Dimensional mail can also be effective as a thank you gift or follow up.
  • Gauge return vs. potential cost to ensure the campaign is worthwhile.

Dimensional Mail Use

Looking for a creative way to incorporate dimensional mail into your campaign?  Consider these examples:

A hybrid disk and storage developer used dimensional mail to get inquirers to take a demo. They sent a bento box shaped package to prospects. The box contained chopsticks, a photo of sushi and a mock-up $150 restaurant gift card.  Customers who completed a demo received a real $150 gift card to the restaurant.

Another use case was for a medical company.  The company was trying to get candidates to sign.  They sent a box of healthy snacks including a company calendar and personalized postcard that highlighted the company benefits to entice potential candidates.

Everyone is excited to receive a package, regardless of what’s inside of the box. Make your mailing count with a well-defined list, thoughtful strategy and thorough follow up.

Need help with your print? Talk to a live print expert today: 800-930-7978.

Brochure Best Practices

Brochures that Don't Bore

Brochures are the best way to market just about anything. Perfect for tradeshows, leave-behinds, in-store service offers, menus, maps, mailers – the list goes on and on and on. Here are some tips for making the most out of your brochures.

The 5 Essential Brochure Archetypes

There are different kinds of brochures appropriate for specific scenarios.

  • Leave behinds
  • Point of sale
  • Direct mail
  • Response
  • Sales support

Your company doesn’t have to narrow its focus to just one category, but can use multiple brochures to promote different aspects of your company’s services.

Custom Features: High Octane Print Fuel

One of the best ways to make your company stand out is with custom features. Soft touch paper, hot foil stamping, die cuts, custom folds, metallic inks, spot UV coating, foil stamping and embossing add a polished touch that grabs customer attention.

Tight Cuts For Tighter Budgets

Die cuts are the coolest: you can get a brochure that looks like Abe Vigoda’s face, but that’s gonna cost you. On a tighter budget? Consider cuts that have flair without the expense of a die cut. Our favorite example is the Angled Stair Step Cut, for brochures that are 8.5 x 11 (flat paper size) or larger. This unexpected look is modern, stylish, and cost effective. And your competition isn’t doing it (yet).

button

 

Do’s and Don’ts

These tips will make your brochure current, clean, refined and most importantly, effective.

Why are you doing this?

Before you begin, know why you’re creating your brochure and what you want it to accomplish. This will help with messaging, and with knowing if you should use custom features to execute that messaging.

Make the cover count

People judge books by the cover. Brochures are really just big covers. What we’re saying is: your brochure cover should be powerful, captivating and pristine.

White space is your friend

It’s a brochure, not a novel. Don’t cram too much on a page. If your brochure appears too busy, the eye will have no path to follow, and people will abandon it.

Creative typography never hurts

While Times New Roman is more classic than an Audrey Hepburn movie, a little Marilyn Monroe never hurt anybody. Use creative typography that represents your business and that grabs the eye. But remember: everything in moderation. And stop with the Comic Sans. Seriously.

Break conventional perspectives

Brochures are perfectly designed to break your ideas into neat little compartment, if you like being boring. Break perspective and traditional brochure expectations to surprise customers.

Have a clear call to action

Marketing works if it drives action so make sure your reader knows exactly what  to do. Make the call to action visible, concise and put it front and center.

Don’t forget pictures

Show, don’t tell. Throwing paragraphs of text across your brochure panels without any visuals is boring.

But don’t use the same old stock photos

With so many companies outsourcing or taking their own high-quality photos, stock images can dull your edge on the competition and come across as kitsch. There are still good stock photos out there, just dig a little deeper.

Don’t just list features

People are only interested in what applies to them. Sadly, all the fancy features of your product don’t fall into that category. The benefits of those features, however, have everything to do with your customer.

Don’t talk about yourself

Zip it and listen. Think about your customer and center your brochure on the problem you solve for them, not the product and not yourself.

Don’t try to say it all

Trying to cram too much information into your brochure can hurt your messaging because if you’re saying everything you’re saying nothing.

There you go, all the everything you need to make a great brochure. Well except the artwork. Want it to look amazing? We can’t help you because amazing doesn’t describe how perfect our brochures look. We can do better than that.

Need help with your print? Talk to a live print expert today: 800-930-7978.

3 Tips for Creating a Stellar Menu

Menu_header_11152016 (2)

A menu is the only form of advertising that is guaranteed to be seen by your customers. If you’re reading this, you aren’t willing to settle for any ordinary menu. And why should you? With a large variety of paper stocks and custom printing effects available, you don’t have to succumb to standard ink and paper.  Take charge of your menu.  Create a memorable and impactful piece that grabs your customer’s attention. Interested?  Check out our insider’s tips below.

Know How to Fold Your Menu

Seriously? Fold my menu? Is this really your tip? Yes! Folding your menu is actually important! It reduces the size of a menu without compromising the space for messaging. Physically smaller menus are easier to maneuver in crowded restaurants. Folds create small sub-sections within your general menu. Creating a separate panel for appetizers, entrees and desserts draws attention to the fact that your customer may want a starter, main dish and after dinner treat. Folds can be used to steer your customer’s attention in the direction you want. A compact, well designed menu helps your customer navigate through your offerings.

Expert Advice:  Consider the placement of your text and photos when you are designing your menu template. Don’t place text or entrée images over a fold because they will be hard to read.

Standard Folding Options

Half-Fold Menus

A half-fold is a single sheet menu printed on both sides and folded into half. Perfect for menus with two categories such as appetizers and entrées.  You can easily separate your menu into two sections while keeping a front and back cover for your company logo and information.

Half_Fold (2)

Tri-Fold Menus

A tri-fold menu is a single sheet of paper printed on both sides and folded into thirds. They are perfect for a large menu or a menu that offers variety. Tri-folds allow several panels for multiple categories such as breakfast, lunch and dinner options.

Tri-Fold (1)

Don’t Forget Custom Printing Effects

Special Effects encourage your customers to interact with your menu.  They draw your customer in and leave them with a lasting impression about your premium establishment and menu options. Wondering what effect will give your menu the biggest impact? The answer depends what you’re trying to achieve.

Here’s the Skinny:

  Spot UV

  • Use Spot UV to draw your customers attention to a particular item on your menu such as your world famous cheesecake.
  • Gives an image or text contrast so it pops off the paper.  Text or images with Spot UV catch your eye when a menu is tipped back and forth.

  Foil Stamping

  • Adds shimmer and texture to help highlight a specific word or image.
  • For an example, make your business logo stand out with foil stamping.

  Metallic Inks

  •  Special inks with reflective metallic particles.  Metallic inks create a subtle shine and luster you won’t see with standard inks.
  •  Use metallic inks to highlight your company name.  Make menu text pop by using silver ink on a black paper stock.

 Embossing

  •  Creates a raised, three dimensional image.
  •  Use embossing on your company logo to convey your premium market position.

  Die Cut

  •  Allows you to create a unique shape for your menu (Ex. wine bottle, hamburger or surfboard).
  •  A die cut can create a cut out, layered look or special image design on your menu.
  •  For an example, embossing a triangle with an image of a pizza slice helps customers make the unconcious connection between a shape (triangle) and your renowned deep dish pie.

Use SmartFlex® Paper For Tough Menus

Yes, it is a thing and yes, it does exist!  SmartFlex® synthetic paper is water, tear, stain and heat resistant.  It is durable and can withstand spills.   With SmartFlex® you will save time and money because you won’t have to keep printing your menu over and over.

SmartFlex looks and feels much better than lamination AND lasts much longer.

Sound amazing?  Well, it is!

Need help with your print? Talk to a live print expert today: 800-930-7978.

Menus and SmartFlex® – the Perfect Pairing

SmartFlex

One of the main challenges restaurants face is the menu. From deciding which dishes to serve, to the ingredients required to make them, the menu is one of the main drivers of success. While this blog isn’t going to help you choose whether to offer Italian or French cuisine, we’re excited to help with at least one component of menus!

In this article on RestaurantEngine.com, the author identified the menu as the #1 common problem facing restaurants. In addition to sharing some good advice on the breadth of product offerings, there’s solid advice on how to layout and present your menu. In that list:

  • Keep your menus clean – no grease and no food or water stains. Get rid of worn or torn menus.
  • Update your menu and prices at least once a year.

We couldn’t agree more, and we have the best solution for beautiful, durable, waterproof menus. Easy to clean, tear-resistant SmartFlex® is a synthetic paper stock that is a perfect option for modern menu printing.

There are a number of benefits to using synthetic stock for a restaurant menu. With SmartFlex, you can simply wipe off any grease, spilled drinks, or food. The color won’t fade or smear, and you’ll be able to keep your menus clean and ready for the next table you seat.

The durability of SmartFlex is also a win for the budget-conscious restaurateur. Laminated and plain paper menus will suffer the abuse of diners poorly and end up cracked, ripped, or completely destroyed. You might have to print a few rounds of your menu just to keep up! With SmartFlex, the worst tantrum of a 3 year old won’t tear the paper, and water/soda/coffee/juice will simply wipe right off. There’s no lamination to crack, no paper to warp or fade.

Because synthetic menus are so durable and reliable, you will ultimately save time and money when you need to reprint. Instead of having to scramble to replace your aging stock of laminated, torn menus because they’re just plain worn out, SmartFlex gives you time to plan the newest versions. Your SmartFlex menus will continue to do hard duty in customer hands, and you won’t need to do any costly rush print runs to cover the gap.

In high volume, high traffic environments, it’s easy to lose more than a few menus to the hustle and bustle of patrons, overzealous bussers, and spills. For those of you with that kind of traffic, synthetic menus would be a great choice to keep your food and drink options in front of your customers in vibrant, durable color.

With the new year approaching, it’s time to rethink your menu options. Need help with your print? Talk to a live print expert today: 800-930-7978 or check out our menu page for sizing and custom printing options.

Measuring Marketing Success for a Small Business

Measuring_Marketing_Success_HEADER_11022016 Small businesses depend on marketing just as much as large businesses, maybe even more – even when they’ve become a household name in their local area. How do you track marketing success? How do you get insight from marketing failures? This is a challenge for every business, but it can especially daunting for a small business that can’t afford to hire marketing specialists.

Here are some tips for getting small businesses marketing plans running smoothly, and providing you with real metrics that drive results.

Learn What to Calculate and Why

Before you can dig into figuring out how to grade your marketing performance, you have to know what to measure and why. At the end of the day, the only number that matters is cash – how much sweet, sweet revenue did you make? But marketing metrics can tell you a lot more about the health of your business, and sometimes the numbers aren’t as straightforward as you think. Dive into this alphabet soup and see what you should be monitoring.

LTV. Life time value – this is how much money you earn from an average customer over the course of their entire business cycle with you. Do you have repeat customers? Ongoing subscription plans? How long do these customers, on average, keeping coming back? Crunch the numbers and figure out how much you make from a customer over their lifetime.

CAC. Customer Acquisition Cost – or CAC – is one of the most important metrics to track. It is easy to calculate too, just add up all of your marketing expenses over a time period including salaries and overhead, and divide it by how many new customers you acquired. Compare your CAC to your LTV – the LTV should be at least 3x higher for successful marketing. For example, if you spend $100 to acquire a customer, but on average they spend $500 with you – that’s some great marketing.

NPS. Net promoter score – this is a measure of how willing your customers are to talk about and promote your business. This number can be negative – that’s really terrible. If your NPS is above 50% you are doing an amazing job. Most companies have an NPS score of around 25-30%. Here is some advice on calculating your NPS score.

Digital Engagement. This category covers different scores such as time on page (how long a customer stays on your page), to email open rates, to clicks on paid click ads. This is an easy way to measure if people are using your website, opening your email, or clicking your offers. If you are doing digital marketing (and you should!) the tools you use should provide ways to monitor digital engagement.

Attribution. Attribution measures how much a specific touch, ad, email or direct mail send moved the customer closer to buying. Attribution is incredibly hard to measure and everyone seems to have a different opinion on how it works. Despite that, it is important that you try to calculate it because even the attempt at figuring out your attribution will help you. Soon you’ll be thinking about your marketing efforts in different terms. Here is some info on measuring first and last touch marketing attribution.

Of course there are a lot more metrics you can target but these will get you started.

Start With Digital Marketing

Digital marketing includes a range of tactics, from posting to your blog to advertising on Facebook. Though each of these options are very different, they all make tracking real-time engagement easy.

There is a giant pile of tools, solutions, and apps out there that can help a small business track marketing efforts. For a small business just getting started with tracking their marketing, digital channels make it easy to dive in and start doing the math. Start with these tools:

  • Mailchimp is the gold standard in free and low-cost email marketing platforms. They offer easy to use reporting tools for email campaigns and great technical support, how-to guides, and forums.
  • Google Analytics is used by just about every company with a website to track every possible metric for a website. Large marketing teams will have specialists dedicated just to this program, but you can still learn how to use its basic features and they will be enough to give you insights into digital marketing.
  • Hubspot has great, free resources for all things marketing related, check out their Excel templates for tracking marketing metrics.
  • Built in tools for social platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Hootsuite and more offer ways to monitor your clicks, tweets,

Keep Records Updated

Keep your records accurate. Update all of your metrics at least once a month and if you can, use a tool to help you automate your marketing reports. Enterprise level marketing automation programs may be out of your reach, but with some clever spreadsheets and elbow grease, you can keep accurate data throughout the year.

Compare your results to your marketing plan, but don’t be afraid to change your idea of success. Maybe you’re falling behind on revenue goals, obviously that isn’t good. But what if you find social media efforts are paying off and you’re adding new followers? Should you stop putting money and effort into Twitter? It may make more sense to test ways to make Twitter a revenue generator.

Keeping accurate, timely records won’t just show you where you’re failing, but where you’re succeeding behind your own back.

Weight and Score Your Touches

In a typical campaign you may send a customer an email, a coupon in the mail, and then send them a Facebook ad if they’ve followed you. You should weight and score each of these send. How you do this is more art than science, and will change as you do more and more marketing. In this example, you could weight the email as being cheap, fast, and easy to duplicate.

If people are responding it it really well, clicking through and reading the site you direct them to, then you can score it highly. The direct mail coupon is going to be expensive compared to the email, but maybe not as expensive a Facebook ad. Measure these differences and give yourself a scoring system that works.

End with a Digital Strategy

There is a whole world of marketing outside of digital channels, and they’re often way more expensive than sending an email or paying for a Facebook ad. They’re also harder to track, but driving customers back online leverages the power of digital reporting. Big companies pay big bucks for special software to get this sort of functionality, but you can mimic these tools by making your calls to action point back online.

If you use a printed piece to advertise your business, make the call to action feature your URL. If you send coupons, make them redeemable online. Use unique coupon codes to tag and track where your customers are coming from.

There are plenty of online resources to help you learn more about marketing, reporting, and metrics. They’re complimented by tools that can help you build reports. They can give you clear, actionable insight into your marketing. They help you learn from success and failure. 

Need help with your print? Talk to a live print expert today: 800-930-7978.

Plastics and Printing

Plastics and Print

We’ve added some real innovations to the printing industry in our 20 year history, and one that we’re really proud of is SmartFlex® paper. This is a synthetic paper that is made from plastic but has the same look, feel, and properties (well, the good properties) of regular wood-pulp.

We developed this paper stock and put it to use printing anything that needs to look perfect, but still be perfectly indestructible. How tough is SmartFlex? Well, here is a list of its superpowers:

  • It can’t be drowned – totally waterproof, your printed materials can go for a swim.
  • It can’t be torn – incredibly tear-resistant, you can’t accidently tear the edges of SmartFlex prints.
  • It’s always looks great – stain-resistance means coffee can’t harm it, making SmartFlex a great choice for menus.

Obviously, we love SmartFlex and we’re proud to bring innovation to the printing landscape. We also know how to print on plastic paper, winning tons of awards for our quality and customer service, but SmartFlex is just the tip of the plastic iceberg. There’s a whole world of plastics to explore.

Plastic Cards

Stand out with a plastic business card – perfect if you’re the sort of person that works on or near water or the outdoors. You can use affordable plastic cards to create your own membership cards, renewal cards, and personal entry or data cards. Think items like magnetic strips, barcodes, and personalization is out of your budget? Think again!

Take a look at plastic cards for a variety of uses if you’re exploring new marketing options. They can be added to direct mail sends or other printed pieces where they form a very official, tangible centerpiece. Plastic cards have an air of authority and can boost others’ perception of your company.

Menus and Brochures

Plastic paper like SmartFlex® really shines when it is used in a food and beverage environment. The plastic paper comes in different weights (sorta like thickness) that can be folded into familiar (or unique) menus. Just like regular paper, you can get SmartFlex in a variety of finishes and coatings – but no matter what you choose, you’re going to benefit from the waterproof and stain-resistant superpower of plastic paper. Not to mention, it’s basically indestructible so your customers won’t be banging up your menus, leaving them looking dingy and grubby.

Brochures, maps, and field guides are all great options for synthetic paper.

SmartFlex_Drink_Menu

Hang-tags

Hang-tags cover a range of items, from door hangers that can be used as marketing materials to ID or parking badges for hanging in, or on, a car. Hang-tags are often exposed to the elements and need to be protected from the weather. Plastics are a great idea, and if the plastic is coated with any type of protective coating, such as a matte finish, it will help reduce the effects of light fading the ink over times.

Thick Outdoor Plastics

Sometimes you need to go big or go home. The thickest types of plastic we print on is called Styrene. Made from composited layers of plastic, this material comes in a range of sizes and is so thick it can’t be folded, but it can be die cut and it prints very well. This rugged material can be used in outdoor promotional materials, window cards, lightbox signs, bus stop advertisements and anything that needs to take a serious beating.

Special Effects and Plastics

Because of the special way plastic reacts to ink, there are some printing effects that can’t really make it into plastic printing.

  • Pantone colors, or spot color can’t usually print on plastics (it would make them way too expensive).
  • Metallic foil doesn’t work well on plastics.
  • Embossing plastic cards, like a business card, is really only possible if you do a special font and restrict the embossing to just number and letters – perfect for something like a credit card, but you can’t emboss your logo.

Some effects look really, really good with plastics.

  • Plastics can fold very well, if they’re not too thick.
  • Die-cut plastics look fantastic.
  • Special UV effects and metallic foil tend to pop on plastics.

Plastics are an exciting new world for printing. Plastic printing is functional, beautiful, and plastics are completely recyclable. We are leading the industry in plastic-based papers.

Need help with your print? Talk to a live print expert today: 800-930-7978.