Printing businesses are exploring different business models that lies in and around their expertise of making printing exceptional. Variable Data Printing (VDP) is one such technology that can be clubbed with the existing print businesses to cater to print demands of the customers, differently than the competition.
Work etc. can be printed with variable marketing messages based on customer type (Existing or New). Variable Data Printing can be essentially viewed as collaborating static and constant variables without giving print in command every type or designing different documents with ‘n’ number of variables. These variables can be numbers, alphabets, color or images.
Variable Data Printing: A win-win for print buyers and sellers
Adopting variable data printing in a business is more than a technology, it is convincing customers to adopt variable data in their printed collaterals. After all you are printing for your customers. As per an info trends survey in 2006 for predicting trends in VDP, nearly 36 percent of the respondents indicated that they are combining their transactional documents with marketing messages while 33 percent of respondents say that they are planning to do the same in next 5 years. Organizations using trans promotional printing had observed that their response rates were 36 percent than the previous while other metrics including revenue and repetitive orders had seen an up surge of 31.6 percent and 47.6 percent respectively.
The recent statistics from SmithersPira states that the global VDP market opportunity is forecasted to be 853,097 million sheets in 2017 that was around 656,756 million sheets in 2012. Let’s see how VDP can help your customers and how you can make it an integral part of your printing business.
How does VDP technology helps business models to evolve?
Printing industry is seeing growth in some of the pockets, while recovering from a global decline. VDP is one such technology that is seeing growth in an overall affected market and cannibalizing other traditional printing methods. A web to print storefront integrated with VDP technology can attract customers and user-friendly to place orders directly to print. VDP combined with direct mail marketing, transpromotional printing and hyper-personalized printing experiences can be utilized for current print businesses to evolve.
VDP is essential pre-requisite to provide personalized print communications to your customers. Industry is already making shift from basic VDP software that allow to change name and address. Integrating VDP with your web to print stores or services can make it easy for customers to do business with you or integrate their systems. Web to print systems with in-built VDP can help in processing large numbers of small value orders in a business to business or business to consumer scenario.
Printing businesses that have more B2B customers can convert themselves into managed print service providers for clients. Printing of business cards, brochures, sales flyers and different transpromo materials can present a lucrative business opportunity for struggling print businesses.
Technologies for VDP
Printing service providers can also identify potential applications to expand their product offerings with portfolio of services such as photobooks, book publishing, packaging, displays or transpromo print. VDP printing has gone beyond name and address customization for multiple customers. Various VDP applications are now available that provide complete document customization as well as color customization.
In transpromo printing, transactional documents like invoices, receipts, bills, proforma, Statement of work can be clubbed with changing marketing messages. VDP applications markets are matured enough to produce customized transactional documents with transpromotional messages as well as customized sales brochure depending on the customer type and needs.
Apart from transpromo printing, document composition software allows customers to design personalized documents. These software are easily integrated with the existing hardware and software, printing businesses are currently using providing efficiency across various printing systems including monochrome, highlight color and full color systems. Such technologies save customer and print business time in personalizing documents.
Also Read: Print Commerce: Bridging generation gap of old industry with new age technology
How print buyers can leverage VDP?
Printing companies deal with marketing departments on clients for printing materials and other branding stuff. With world getting digitalized, printing marketing budgets are shrinking for companies, most of the investments are going in interacting customer over digital medium. Marketing managers are often being questioned about the ROI of print marketing campaigns or how their print ads or offers are contributing to the bottom line of the companies. Some are able to identify however most of them are not because they are not able to create differentiation and measure the impact of the communications.
Printing businesses can take up the role of consultants to help marketing teams to improvise their printing campaigns by extending variable data capabilities. Printing industry has already seen a lot of shift towards hyper-personalization from mass production. Digital print capabilities make it possible to produce shorter run of prints with data management and workflows. Customer know about the power of hyper-personalization for their print communications but they need to be provide with the right VDP software. VDP can be clubbed with transaction documents your customers are sending to their customers. Present them with a set of sample and show them how can transaction documents like invoices, receipts, bills, proforma, Statement of Work etc. can be clubbed with marketing messages to add one more channel in their marketing.
Normally every printed marketing communications is associated with costs and the costs of producing every piece as personalized for different segments for customers can add up the costs. VDP has become highly successful because of the cost-effective print personalization it provides for marketing communications.
The future of Printing Industry with VDP
Printing industry is going to be highly disrupted – ‘for better’ in coming years. Growth is not going to be uniform and sector needs to look for digitally integrated print alternatives. Conventional printing needs to adopt web to print integrated with VDP to survive in the longer run. VDP technologies can evolve more with time to produce printing assets clubbed with Virtual and Augmented Reality. Printing businesses need to be prepared with a humble start of offering basic VDP software to their customers.
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