If you’re anything like most business owners out there, you’re always trying to find ways to improve how you do things. Whether it’s finding more efficient ways to take orders so you can do them more quickly and effortlessly or improving your knowledge of a specific line of products so you can make better purchasing decisions, there are countless ways to improve the efficiency of your business so you can continually optimize your practices.

When it comes to working with a commercial printer, there are a number of ways you can optimize your business relationships and improve the efficiency of your communications with them.

Finding more efficient ways to handle any partnership your business has with another business or organization can end up saving you tons of money and end up benefiting both you and your print provider.

To help you find ways to optimize your dealings with commercial printers and get the most you can out of them, we’ve come up with four key tips that can make doing so a cinch.

Tip 1. Determine your specs by chatting with a print specialist.

Some types of specs are very costly and can be avoided by communicating with your print sales representative. Often, we find a customer may use a certain size because "we've just always done it that way," and they don't realize there are more cost-effective options available.

Real world example: a company provides its new hires with an FAQ document, which was 3 8.5x11 pages stapled together in the top left-hand corner. This meant the customer had to pay for three pages front and back, plus the additional cost of stitching or stapling on top of it all.

Just by chatting with one of our print representatives for a few minutes, we were able to suggest an alternative option that involved practically no extra design work by consolidating it into an 11” x25.5” trifold, resulting in a cost reduction of about 60 percent.

Tip 2. Communicate with your printer.

If you have a trade show or anything with a hard deadline coming up, give the dates to your printer at the beginning of the process so they accommodate your print needs. There are a countless number of factors that can influence the speed at which your commercial printer is able to complete the printing on a job, so never convince yourself your deadline would be impossible for a printer until you ask.

There have been countless times we’ve exceeded customers expectations and helped them set new expectations for just how quick and affordable print can be within time constraints that they previously thought were impossible.

Settling for a lower quality commercial printer because you have concerns about the tightness of your deadline can also be a very costly mistake to make. It's less expensive and time-consuming for all parties involved when print buyers are more transparent about deadlines upfront and print sellers are able to set realistic expectations for turnaround time and price.

Tip 3. Ask your printer for samples.

Most reputable printing companies have a sample packet or booklet available to showcase their available paper and coating options. While it is possible for printing companies to have some pretty nifty, highly detailed descriptions of different paper types and their common uses, it’s not the same as physically getting your fingers on it.

Knowing how thick 100# gloss text will be when printed is much easier to do when you can touch and feel it for yourself.

In addition, paper sample books can give you a good idea of the print quality you can expect if you were to order from that company. You can also get a pretty good idea of how skilled the printing company’s binding, shipping and folding teams are by taking a closer look at their handywork in the paper sample guide they send you.

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Order Your FREE Paper Sample Guide from Conquest Graphics Today!

Choosing the right paper for your next project can be a challenge, especially when you don’t know exactly what you’re ordering. That’s why we suggest all of our customers get our FREE Paper Sample Book. It features rich and colorful examples from both our offset and digital presses printed on a variety of our most popular Preferred Paper and coating configurations.

Using our Preferred Paper will help you get the most value and fastest turnaround times. However, we are happy to accommodate other configurations, and paper types to suit your exact specifications.

Tip 4. Become familiar with a printer’s capabilities and product offerings.

Just as with any vendor you do business with, you should do a little background research before deciding to give them a try with some of your business. Checking out the commercial printer’s website is absolutely essential so you can know how technologically capable and innovative they are.

If a company seems like they haven’t really entered the digital era yet, then they’re most likely not the best choice for a company that’s hoping to benefit from the huge savings and increased reliability provided by print other companies that have implemented cutting-edge technologies and techniques to automate their printing processes.

Some of the key things you should make sure a printer is able to handle so you can get the most out of print’s capabilities today are:

• Digital printing – while many commercial printers have at least one digital press on hand, there are still a lot out there that are exclusively using the stone-age mechanics of offset printing to complete all their jobs. Since offset printing is such a manual and time-consuming process, the prices of printing with someone who mostly prints offset will be far higher than those of modern day presses that are using a healthy blend of the two techniques.

• Variable data printing – while this kind of dovetails with digital printing, variable data printing is one of the capabilities of commercial presses that is most important in modern print marketing. People are coming to expect more personalized experiences in print nowadays, so it’s important for you to be able to offer that by customizing each printed piece to the names and other details of your customers so they know how much you care about them as an individual.



• Direct and Bulk Mailing – while this is only relevant for businesses that will be mailing a great deal of their print, it is something that is extremely important for businesses that will be mailing printed pieces to make sure their printer is capable of. Choosing a printer that has an in-house mail center will yield you the biggest savings in mailing costs, while also bringing you a huge time savings, allowing you to get pieces printed and mailed to your customers days sooner than you would if you had to do each of these steps with a different vendor.

• High Quality Free Resources – sometimes, a commercial printer will offer free resources as a way of providing their insight on print industry trends for their customers and prospects. While this is all very helpful and kind, it doesn’t necessarily mean that those resources are all that useful. Typically, printers that are leading their industry are contributing a lot to the public discussion surrounding their trade, just as top scholars lead the conversation on the newest findings in their field or the biggest futurists provide the most useful feedback on the cutting-edge of innovation. High quality free content is a very good harbinger of high quality print.

• Enterprise Ordering Portals – today’s web-to-print printers typically offer a selection of digital products and services to accommodate the demanding nature of print marketing for franchises, businesses that are geographically spread out, and businesses that rely heavily upon the regular ordering of print. That’s why any good printer offers ordering portal capabilities for businesses of all shapes and sizes. To get the most out of your commercial printer going forward, you need to know whether they offer these types of digital products even if you may not need one for your business right away, as this could come in handy one day for saving your business big time as it grows along with its need for print marketing.

While this list isn’t necessarily exhaustive, it does provide a good overview of the kinds of services and products you should make sure your printer offers before placing your first order with them.

While you may not even need to take advantage of all these offerings right away, what having these perks and services does is prove that there are at least a few more things that you can take advantage of to get more out of a printer than you would with most other run-of-the-mill printers out there.

Other key things to note...

One of the most important themes that runs throughout each of our four tips for improving your dealings with commercial printers is that of customer service.

Ordering print isn’t like ordering something off Amazon. It’s much more complex and there are an overwhelming number of options and job specifications that can heavily impact the final product you receive, its pricing and the speed at which it arrives.

This is why good customer service is so vital in your search for a print provider. If your printer isn’t able to understand what you’re trying to do with your print marketing, it’ll be harder to guarantee the things you print with them will be correctly produced each and every time.

If you don’t work with a printer who knows your account well and who continually improves your business’ relationship with their production team while optimizing your ordering process and assisting you in finding more cost-effective ways of achieving the same print marketing goals, you’ll never know for sure whether you’re actually getting the most out of your commercial printer.

Using some of our tips above will hopefully help you figure out how you can save even more and print more efficiently the next time you need to order print.