Why print industry should adopt Software as a service (Saas)web to print solution to get more ROI

Print industry digitalization helps to achieve efficiency and productivity in maturing and consolidated printing market. With the advent of Software as a service and API economy, it has become easier for the print service providers to implement platforms shifting business processes from being a traditional asset-intensive industry to as-a-service based model.

Web to print is an instrumental software investment and helped in realizing printers (who have invested and adopted it wisely) in realizing the return on investment. Web to print solutions have now been available in different pricing models like subscription basis or hosted that includes one-time investment from the printing businesses. With web to print solutions, the printing industry is able to cater to varied requirements of customers and get more sales.

How Web to Print helps in realizing ROI?
Avoid large upfront IT investments – Printing businesses are into hardware investments for producing quality products, better machinery, advanced equipment and the list goes on. With most of the investments taking in hardware-software investments take a back seat because of the huge upfront costs involved, lack of skilled manpower to manage and maintai
IT infrastructure and finding out a right vendor to digitalize print businesses. Web to print helps businesses that are looking to start their digital journey in avoiding large upfront costs because of subscription models available. The catch to understand here is to avoid looking for a right web to print solution but adopt a technology to solve business problems.

Web to print with inbuilt design studio helps in increasing product base on the website for customers to customize and order while a robust web to print with Print MIS helps in reducing costs and efforts that go in managing orders and cut down waste expenses.

Shorter Runs, More Value – Traditional ways of running printing businesses have to incur more costs in printing shorter runs and as the demand for hyper-personalized printing products shoots up, customers don’t want repetitive designs and tasks.Web to print help businesses in printing on demand and managing the entire printing cycle without lack in approval workflow or missing Print MIS integration.

Designsta, a web to print portal being put by graphic designer, Louise Clark, for budding female entrepreneurs to address the growing demand of using graphics and images without paying hefty charges for the same. Web to print enabled Designsta customers (entrepreneurs) to pay for their printing orders on the monthly subscription basis rather than paying per order. This helped customers to pay-on-the-use and create varied graphics for their business needs. The web to print solution used by Designs is hosted by the service provider to avoid the hassle of managing servers and paying huge up-front licensing costs.

The competitive advantage of unique business model helped Designsta to achieve 100% client acquisition within few months of a website launched. The unique propositions that are valued by Designs customers are the private storefront, accessible to registered paid customers, trial account and monthly membership programs and online design tool with pre-loaded design templates.

Reduction in pre-press costs – Printing businesses with high volumes and complex print jobs understand how speed and accuracy are essential for completing the print jobs without incurring extra costs. Manual press workflow is not agile enough to cope up with changing business and customer requirements and thus digital press workflow enabled via the web to print solutions can be an excellent step to reduce pre-press errors and costs incurred.

A successful and well-implemented web to print will require regular monitoring and tweaking to enhance customers experience as well as efficiency for pre-press workflows. Pre-press jobs like sizing, cropping and merging images in photoshop, place encapsulated images, spell check all text, remove unused colors and checking colors and save document copy for print production. These are just a few steps that are done to ensure that print-ready files are set to go into production and are done manually resulting in a high percentage of error rates.
Print businesses that have been using the web to print solution have realized that they have lowered pre-press job costs up to 30 to 50 percent with increasing customer retention and acquiring new customers.

Revamping business model – Web to print has been instrumental in revamping business model for printing businesses. Getting orders for flyers, brochures, marketing materials etc. is a passe and businesses are changing to provide better products and solutions to customers.

Print Marketplace, Printing and Mailing services, Print Marketing Services, Franchisee printing services and Print-as-a-service are few of the successful models built around the web to print. This helps print service providers in realizing the investment they made for implementing and adopting web to print platform.

With the offline business model, it is very tough to capitalize on the existing customers because of the uncaptured data whereas with the web to print models it is very much possible to come with loyalty and rewards program to reward customers that are associated with you from long. These returns are not been realized by printing businesses and even if they tried it’s for high-value customers with a substantial contribution in the bottom line of businesses. But with a right web to print solution every customer can be tapped to cross-sell and up-sell products benefiting business.

Conclusionr
Digital technologies are stepping up the game and thus, web to print is here to stay. Those who have adopted web to print business models have already revolutionized the printing business for end-users as well as printers. Web to print offers tangible and intangible returns on investment for businesses likely to operate in long run. Web to print is just a technology but business models are something unique to every business and are real difference makers.

Printing businesses should look for unrealized returns in form of repetitive customers, cutting down waste expenses, offering products and services as packages or providing print services via print marketplaces. Deciding on a print model that can sustain in digital age, web to print offers numerous ways to tap unrealized ROI.