Understanding the Importance of Sustainable and Scalable Processes
Do more with less – it’s a phrase every marketing leader has heard. You’re constantly being challenged to grow customer engagement, provide meaningful experiences, and consistently fill pipelines, all while decreasing expenses and resources. It’s a tall task – especially as marketing teams continue to get leaner and the day-to-day grind becomes more fast-paced and time-sensitive. But it’s a task that can be accomplished with a combination of the right tools, smart choices, and repeatable processes.
The Power of Marketing Automation
While you may never be able to eliminate all of the rework in your marketing strategy, leveraging tools like marketing automation can help eliminate repetitive steps that negatively impact performance. Rather than creating and recreating emails and campaigns from scratch, marketing automation allows anyone on your team the ability to clone user-friendly email templates and then make brand-approved adjustments.
Just think about what your creative services team might be able to do with all of that extra free time each week.
But when it comes to marketing automation, it’s not just about making your emails and campaigns scalable. Think bigger. It can help automate and elevate your social media, lead generation, landing pages, segmentation rules, and more. It’s a tool that can save you time across the board by creating repeatable processes and automated efficiencies, and has resulted in 1 in 3 marketing executives proclaiming it’s improved their department’s productivity and ROI.
Figure Out What Works and Repeat
The marketing teams that do the most with limited resources are the ones that understand what works and then replicates it. This goes beyond simple email campaigns and what marketing automation can do. This advanced tactic lets your team take entire programs – like an event or direct mail campaign for example – and replicate all of the content, workflows, materials, etc. It’s a great way to implement best practices and maximize your team’s time.
As the old saying goes “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
Image this example. Each month, your company onboards several new accounts and part of the onboarding process involves them receiving a personalized welcome box with some company swag. It’s an easy way to say thank you and enhance the customer journey but it can be time consuming. Think about the effort and resources it would take each month to gather information for each new client, compile a mailing list, design each custom box, order the swag, print the boxes, assemble the boxes, ship them, and then finally track the results. If you’re not exhausted after reading that, I’m impressed.
Now consider this – if your team develops a process that can be cloned each month, the process becomes a well-oiled machine. They can use a CRM to house the contact information and lists, include personalized variable fields on the creative, and standardize processes for printing, shipping and tracking engagement. Or better yet, they can find a tool that can take care of the creative, fulfilment and shipping – further freeing up their time.
Reaping the Benefits
At the end of the day, if you’re like most, your marketing budget isn’t getting any bigger and sustainable and scalable processes and programs are going to become more important than ever before.
While it’s nice to relieve your marketing team from performing repetitive tasks, on a larger scale, the right tools and smart choices can do so much more. You’ll be able to regain hours, lower your operational costs, reach a larger audience, and measure concrete success. You’ll truly be able to reach the marketing holy grail – doing more with less.
Are you interested in learning about how Strata can help you scale your marketing efforts? Contact us today and see what we can do for you.
Print On Demand Systems and Variable Printing Software
Printing fulfillment at many companies – particularly large or growing organizations – can be prone to several issues:
- Waste
- Redundancy
- Over-spending
- Delays to market
- Quality control
By implementing technology solutions to drive print processes, businesses realize significant cost savings, faster time to market and improved personalization. Higher-quality finished products are an additional benefit.
So how exactly do tech-driven printing approaches such as print-on-demand portals and variable printing software promote cost savings, quality and efficiency? Here’s the “fine print.”
Placing Print Orders in the Digital Age: Print as Ecommerce
A web2print system for print supply and distribution gives users all the ease of online shopping:
- User-friendly Print Fulfillment
Web-based portals store print jobs digitally. Users can easily search for and select the collateral needed, and customize according to approved modifications. The portal serves as an online catalog where users can “shop” for what they need in minutes rather than spend hours searching through multiple archives and folders to locate assets. A print-on-demand portal stores all job details: quantities, pricing, vendors, turnaround times, specs, logistics, etc. - Reduced Obsolescence and Tighter Inventory Control
The “ecommerce” approach provides back-end benefits as well in terms of tracking print orders and reporting on usage. On-demand printing eliminates the need for mass-quantity print runs, thus decreasing storage needs and wasted spend on obsolete materials. (This also prevents potential customers from receiving collateral that’s no longer relevant, which happens more frequently than you’d think.) - Centralized Approach to Procurement
A web-based print management system cuts down on the number of vendors a company needs to manage. This centralized approach opens up the opportunity to obtain lower price points by moving from individual transaction-based pricing to longer-term contract pricing.
Better Quality and Flexibility Means More Effective Print Marketing
- Maintain Brand Consistency
Compromising brand integrity can be a headache when it comes to customizing marketing materials. However, customization becomes much simpler – and controllable – with dynamic templates. Templates allow, for example, a local sales rep to incorporate regional information on a product brochure. It eliminates the dilemma of supplying local marketers with approved branding assets and crossing your fingers that they’ll use them properly. And corporate staff will thank you for the hours they gain back when they don’t need to constantly fulfill requests for customization. - Automate the Proof and Approval Process
You have greater control over the finished product, with real-time editing capabilities and instant, interactive proofs. Goodbye human error and backlogs, hello accuracy and streamlined approval processes. Project tracking features can eliminate the back and forth and days-long waiting periods involved in traditional print processes. - Variable Data Print Capabilities
Personalization is no longer the future of marketing – it’s arrived. Today’s leading marketers know that personalization is imperative to connect with targets and capture market share. Software that supports variable data printing can immediately pull in data to populate output, so you can fully leverage your customer data to create segmented mailings that support higher response rates and qualified leads. Beyond reducing costs, this aspect can actually contribute to the bottom line by driving higher response rates and sales.
How Can Technology Make Your Print Processes Smarter?
For more than 20 years, Greater Philadelphia-based Strata Company has helped clients leverage technology to save time and money. Our off-the-shelf software platforms and custom cloud-based solutions enable faster, more accurate print communications. We put the control over branding, workflows and ordering at your fingertips – and take the manual processes off your hands. Contact us to see how we can help.