Print marketing offers a powerful way to connect with local audiences, increase overall brand visibility and improve ROI. In fact, ANA research points to an average ROI of 161% when sending direct mail to existing house lists. While print production requires more planning than digital, the potential return makes it worthwhile.
Figuring out timing is an important part of managing a successful print campaign. Whether you’re preparing for a seasonal promotion or multi-location distribution, you want to get customers’ prints into the right hands at the right moment for maximum impact. With these 5 easy tips, we’ll show you how to hit print production deadlines, avoid delays and achieve your highest ROI in campaigns.
Before jumping into design and printing, choosing materials and shipping options early on in the process can save time and money long-term. Sometimes, companies create a design and select materials that make sense when the time comes, and they often forget about logistics. It can be easy to go straight from idea-making mode to end result if you’re not careful.
Deciding which materials best fit your project and budget before you move on to design or printing can save on time and costs because you'll have a solid plan from start to finish. Considering options for shipping and logistics also helps you create a comprehensive budget and production schedule.
Determining the materials at the beginning helps you get a better idea of how they work realistically with your design, message and budget. Before you even get to printing, you’re more aware of the pros, cons, overall pricing and how it works with your design. This also helps give your print partner an opportunity to guide you in the right direction for your best results. That way, you’re not backtracking farther down in the process after realizing something doesn’t work.
Figuring out shipping and logistics at the beginning also helps to save time and money while keeping projects on track for timing. Some companies shop around to find the best prices for each vendor, only to realize too late that the costs of shipping at each stage cancel out the low savings. The result is more hassle for something that you could have gotten easier and for a similar price with an all-in-one printing partner.
Related Content: How to Select Shipping and Delivery Partners for Print
The next holdup that companies and print partners often experience is during the design stage. A design may get finished relatively quickly, but if client approval takes longer than usual, that has an effect on the overall timeline and things might get sent out too late.
While the initial sign-off can be daunting, prioritizing headway is more important than second-guessing your review and going through too many rounds of feedback. Your review should be thorough, but try not to let it effect your current timeline.
Instead of going back and reviewing on multiple occasions, run the final design through a couple of rounds of internal feedback, make the changes and learn to be content with your final decisions.
Trust your instincts. Using a few internal rounds of feedback and one consolidated round of feedback for your print partner expedites the process and keeps the ball rolling so you can hit print timelines more easily.
Get Help with Your Print Designs
If you’re using your own design files for high-volume print production, the one of the most important steps you can take is ensuring your files are print-ready.
Oftentimes, companies realize too late that their margins are off, the colors are different on print versus the digital rendition, the chosen design and materials don’t match what they had in mind, or the design gets messed up during the printing process. A lot of these issues can be solved by ensuring design files are print-ready.
Some of the best ways to ensure your design files are print-ready include:
This is just the start of some of the things to include in your design files when you send them over to your print partner. Each print partner adheres to slightly different rules with printing, so be sure to ask if you’re not sure about anything.
Related Content: How to Prepare Design Files for Print Marketing
Printing is never just printing. It also includes design, approvals, printing, assembly, finishing and delivery. Fortunately, the extra planning is worth the increased brand awareness and ROI, but it’s still important to note that these steps can take extra time when using different partners because it requires additional delivery in between the stages and locations. When everything is done under one partner, it takes far less time, but approvals and logistics should still be accounted for in overall timeline estimates.
The best way to solve this is to automatically factor in extra buffer time. If you need your print materials sent out for Black Friday before the winter holiday rush, make an internal deadline of mid-October at the latest. Then, you can send out high-volume commercial prints ahead of schedule to get visibility before other competitors. By the time Black Friday is in full swing and all your mail is sent, you’ll be glad you planned ahead.
Applying this same concept for future campaigns and seasonal usage ensures that, even if something goes wrong, you’re still covered. After all, you only get one shot at Black Friday and other important dates, so timing is crucial. It’s important that both clients and suppliers are hitting deadlines.
Our final tip for hitting print production timelines and avoiding delays is to combine printing and logistics into one facility. Instead of keeping these processes separate and utilizing different vendors, the combination keeps things neat, efficient and on time.
Without finding a printing partner with its own logistics company, it can become a nightmare to source a fast, credible shipping and delivery partner who can take everything to USPS. However, by utilizing a partner who already has a full logistics team at their disposal, it takes the extra steps out of the equation.
By combining printing and logistics into one facility, your partner will often take care of your high-volume printing, finishing and assembly needs, and shipping and delivering your materials so they get to the right place. The result is less stress, speedier shipping and timely delivery.
Learning how to hit print production timelines and avoid delays helps remove the extra stress in high-volume printing. If you constantly find yourself racing against the clock at the last minute or struggling to meet print deadlines, these tips can help.
Whether you want to create a seamless printing experience or get your prints out the door faster, our team at Signature Graphics can help. With all-in-one printing services and à la carte options, we service companies at any stage of designing, printing, finishing or delivery. If you want to beat the clock in your next campaign, reach out to us and we’ll show you why our services are the signature option.
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