Web-to-print Strategies

Web-to-print systems can be used in many different ways, and your approach depends on how the system fits into your business strategy. Start your selection process by asking "What best describes my company’s web-to-print strategy?"

These are the 3 most common web-to-print strategies:

1. General e-Commerce
2. Customer Portal/Order Automation
3. Marketing Communication Solution or Marketing Collateral Management System

1. General e-Commerce

“We plan to use our web presence to pick up additional jobs from the public at large, or from companies that have not dealt with us before.”

If this is your strategy, you will want to make your web site as accessible as possible, and you will want to make ordering easy, even for those who are not familiar with you.

Key aspects of this approach are:

• Objective: top-line growth, reduced cost of sales
• You are selling to strangers
• You can’t ask them to log in
• You need to give them an instant quote
• You need to take credit cards

VistaPrint and PrintingForLess.com are prominent examples of companies that have taken this approach. They depend primarily on search-engine advertising and word of mouth to capture new customers, and their orders come in exclusively over the Web. It takes an extremely large investment in advertising to make this strategy work.

Key questions that are relevant to this strategy:

- Can the customer input job information and instantly get a price quote?
- Can anyone with a credit card order a job without logging in?
- Does the system automatically preflight uploaded files?

2. Customer Portal/Order Automation

You have steady customers and you think you can provide enhanced service while reducing your costs by offering a customer customized web-to-print solution.

There are two parts to this strategy: enhance service and reduce costs.

Enhance service: This strategy often involves maintaining a catalog of standing jobs for customers to order from, and helping them with their internal sign-offs and approvals.

Key aspects of this approach:

• Objective: make it easier for customer to do business with you (and harder for them to leave)
• Logging in is required
• There is a catalog of existing jobs for each customer
• The system allows adhoc ordering, along with instant quotes and soft proofs
• The system allows orders for non-print items
• The system supports fulfillment and kitting
• There is support for dealing with orders, approvals, and budgets

Key questions that are relevant to this strategy:

- Can each customer organization have a library of images specific to that organization?
- Can you set up unique payment methods per customer or per group within a customer?
- Can every item (text or graphic) on every page be “locked” to prevent editing by some customers, but remain editable by others in the customer organization? (This feature lets local offices edit addresses or select products to include in local versions of company-wide marketing materials.)

Reduce costs: It is imperative that the web-to-print solution you choose can be easily integrated into your job ordering system. If you have to re-key the orders from your web-to-print system to a job ordering system you will not reduce costs. Just the opposite will occur, because you will find yourself getting more and more small orders. 

Fulfillment of print and non-print items

As part of your customer portal you might plan to provide fulfillment services that will include warehousing and shipment of non-print items.

If your web-to-print strategy involves offering fulfillment services, you may want to have various aspects of warehousing and inventory management built right into the software.

Key aspects to consider include:

• Objective: support a move into fulfillment services
• You may want warehouse-related features
• You may need to handle backorders, level of stock, etc.
• You may want “kitting” features (multiple items ordered collectively as if they were a single item)

You could choose to do this as an extension of your printing business. You can maintain a warehouse with many small items that can be shipped, often along with printed items, to your current customers. The customers log in to place orders and monitor inventory.

Key questions that are relevant to this strategy:

- Can the system support fulfillment items including the ability to track inventory?

- Does the system manage inventory for stored materials?

- Can separate items in the catalog be grouped into single orderable “kits”?

3. Marketing Communication Solution or Marketing Collateral Management System

In this strategy you are selling a marketing solution rather than a print management/order automation solution. Often this strategy includes a way for customers to create VDP jobs, and upload the associated data, over the Web.

Crucial to making this strategy work is the ability to mirror the workflow in marketing departments from creation to print and all the approval processes in between. Included in the workflow is the ability to handle multiple payment options.

Control over the brand while allowing some content to be user-generated is another critical feature. Easy-to-use templates are required to facilitate this feature.

If you are planning to accept VDP jobs over the Web, you need additional capabilities for dealing with databases and templates. You may want your customers to be able to make significant modifications to templates online.

Key aspects of this type of system:

• Objective: make it easy for customers to create and submit VDP jobs (and other jobs, too)
• Strong and flexible VDP support
• Ability to work with VDP jobs over the Web

A typical example is the system that Howard Hanna Real Estate uses to generate “new neighbor” cards. These are postcards that introduce a home purchaser to the residents in the surrounding houses. The postcards are also a reminder to the neighbors that Howard Hanna is available to sell their houses if they decide to move. Agents create the postcards by going online and entering the address of the house, uploading a photo of it, and entering the names of the new residents. The system then generates a set of cards which are mailed to the neighbors. The system uses VDP software combined with a database of local names and addresses and a geographic coding system to pick out the appropriate recipients.

Key questions that are relevant to this strategy:

- Can the customer, while viewing a job on the system, provide replacement text by typing into an on-screen form?

- Can the customer, while viewing a job on the system, provide replacement text by typing directly on the existing text?

- Can customers select and purchase mailing lists via the system?

- Does the system generate variable or personalized email messages for marketing campaigns?

- Does the system integrate with a Personalized URL solution?

To select the best vendor, you must also look at other important factors such as IT expertise, ease of customization, integration, workflow considerations and price.

Use Caslon's Web-to-print System Selection Tool (available free to PODi members) to help you select the web-to-print system that is the best match for your strategy.