Why Customer Self-Service Is the Next Frontier for the Printing Industry

The brand equity remains protected as long as your design files stay within one group, and the same printer handles the job. But the moment the orders start coming in from tens of different regions, fifty franchisees, or a couple hundred field marketers, the control is slipping. Self-service is not an upgrade to a printer’s production capabilities, but the best technology solution for a growing brand to preserve the look and feel of their design across the decentralized print production chain.

Drift initiates with the first non-supervised action

A brand marketing leader can recall too many instances of the brand’s identity being abused. Misleading event banners with stretched logos, a franchise store carrying a slogan from five years ago because nobody informed them, a slightly different red color in a store’s collateral because a manager could not find the Pantone swatch. None of these are intentional, but they happen because a marketing rep needed a banner designed this week, and there was no designer available.

Franchise and multi-location store marketing is when the brand’s presence begins to stretch beyond the control of the marketing team. With one store, there are maybe five people familiar with the brand guidelines, while with 300 stores, there are 300 people with little to no design expertise, all of whom are in a rush to send something to print without consulting the brand guidelines. According to Lucidpress’s “State of Brand Consistency” report, consistent brand presentation makes organizations 3.5x more likely to have high levels of recognition and perceived value. And a more recognizable brand has a revenue uplift between 10-20% with increased consistency.

The standard practice of guidelines distribution as a PDF document to each location fails to address the most prominent challenge: guidelines are merely guidelines. Unless there is a designer present at the time of creation, the brand’s identity is interpreted, not followed.

Turn the rules into the tool

The solution is in turning the rules into the tool. Designing a document that has the brand’s rules enforced as absolute truths eliminates errors stemming from the subjectivity of the designer. A marketer picks the layout, inserts their address or promotion, and is guaranteed to receive an output that adheres to the brand rules because nothing is subject to manipulation. This is known as template locking, and it is the core principle of every web-to-print storefront.

A field rep has no design experience, but they can still utilize the tool to produce a flyer that complies with the brand rules because the limitations of the template are built into the design software. An approved artwork is pulled straight from the brand digital asset management system, thereby guaranteeing its validity.

The same DAM repository usually powers the graphic assets and brand elements accessible within the storefront. There is no searching for the right logo in an email chain because there is only one logo, the latest approved version, available in the portal. Variable data printing works on similar principles: an address or a rep’s contact details can be inserted into a mailer template, but only as a variable data element, a text box, not as a graphic element that can be modified.

Why printers should stop building this from scratch

The print service providers may think of this as a custom portal development project: building a brand storefront portal, connecting the tools, and rolling out updates for two years until it achieves product-market fit. However, that is not the recommended route to take. The simplest and most economical way to design a self-service storefront is to adopt an industry-specific web to print software. Most such tools are cloud/SaaS-based, so a print shop can begin using them within weeks instead of months. Why invest in developing an in-house solution when the competition is already using SaaS?

This consideration is entirely practical rather than philosophical: nobody benefits from the portal’s source code being in house. The value is in the opportunities created by the presence of the portal. Every quotation request, every email asking whether artwork is acceptable, and every proof follow-up is a low-revenue, time-consuming task that a print shop can eliminate by switching to a self-service portal. The job is uploaded by the customer, the proof is reviewed, and the print shop only needs to process the order.

Approval routing does the QA work nobody wants to do twice

When talking about self-service portals, sometimes the conversation forgets about proofing. When a print shop’s pre-press team is the final approver for an evidently off-brand file, their QA role is the last chance to prevent a catastrophe. The correctly configured portal makes them the first line of defense by shifting some of these responsibilities to the customer’s side.

The user roles and permissions in the portal allow the brand to route the proof for approval within their organization before the print shop sees it. A franchisee may order the catalog inserts, but only the regional marketing manager can approve the order to be sent to the printer. This is governance as code: the same way the brand’s guidelines are turned into the design restrictions within the portal. It is also not about the brand’s pre-press team and the print shop’s pre-press team competing to see who missed something. It is about the brand organization having its own QA responsibilities, which is a much better system than relying on the printer to detect errors.

What procurement leaders gain from the insight

Brand consistency is a given, but enterprise print procurement is much more interested in what the portal says about the print spend than the brand guidelines compliance. Every single order that comes through the portal is a line in the spreadsheet for the print procurement leader: who ordered what, how much it costs, how frequently, and where. It is difficult to get this information when the print purchase is managed by dozens of individual buyers or dozens of resellers, all of whom have their own spreadsheets.

Once the print procurement leader has this overview, they can begin consolidating the spend with a single vendor, leveraging volume to negotiate prices. They can identify the rogue spend: the unnecessary print jobs, or the ones that were reprinted due to an artwork error, which creates an opportunity to tighten up the print governance procedures. These errors are the reason why the customer has a print manager in the first place and probably a retainer with a print rep who can answer “Is my job ready to print yet?” promptly. The same procurement manager can leverage the portal to instantly see these details without having to call around.

The template rules can’t be too strict and can’t be too lenient

There is a severe conflict between the desire to make the templates as strict as possible and the need to allow some customization that only the local representatives can provide. That is why the best web-to-print software uses conditional logic: substituting placeholders within the document for local offers or restricting image banks to assets that only a brand rep can see. The brand and the print shop need to agree on the limitations in the document: color and font choices that are permitted regardless of the content, variables that can be inserted within the document, or the elements that cannot be touched.

Nobody expected a storefront adoption rate of 80% after the first month, but if the adoption is lower than expected, the next step is to identify the dealbreakers. The most common ones are the preview tools within the portal, the product catalog, and delivery estimation. If buyers cannot see what the printed product will look like, if the product options are overwhelming, and if the production timing is unclear, the customers will be much more inclined to email a rep than to use the self-service tool. The tool’s value is only realized when it is used by somebody, and it becomes a liability when it is not.

The integration with the customer’s systems is more important than most realize. If the portal’s catalog has nothing to do with the current marketing priorities, the adoption will be low as well. The buyer will not see value in using a tool that is out of sync with their quarterly priorities.

The account is worth more than the job

A customer that orders everything through the portal is much harder to lose than one who only orders occasionally. The portal user has integrated the system into their purchase approval workflow, their marketing, and budget planning. They will not switch to another print vendor just to move their print spend somewhere else; switching would require relearning the entire process. This is when a self-service portal stops being a print production tool and begins playing a much bigger role in the long-term retention strategy.

A printer that sells self-service is no longer selling price and margins but the system that a growing enterprise brand needs to scale without losing control over its branding. And that has much better lifetime value than a regular print shop engagement.