Launch a website

If you want to go online, a website is a must-have for your business. This is the foundation for further online growth. First of all, you should register your domain name and choose web hosting. For example, you can do this with GoDaddy service. They offer a lot of pricing plans that can fit your price range. Make sure that the name of your domain matches your website purpose, is unique and human-readable. Secondly, try to make your website well-designed and user-friendly. No one will use it if it is inconvenient and not appealing. Provide a structured product catalog with photos, descriptions, and prices. 

As your service will be something new, customers may have some questions, so make it easy to contact you. For example, you can create an additional “Contact us” page or place your email on the most visible part of the page. 

Also, consider adding a blog to your website. You can tell your audience about your niche, new products, and special offers there. The more engaging your website is, the more visitors you get!

Consider adding eCommerce platform

Creating a site from scratch with all necessary functionality may take a long time. If you want to build a robust online presence, you should consider integration with an eCommerce platform. There are a lot of useful platforms in the marketplace: Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, OpenCart, and more. Each of them has its pros and cons, but you need to choose the eCommerce platform that suits your needs best. But the thing that unites all of them is the fact that you can run your website in just a few clicks. Besides, launching a store using the eCommerce platform doesn’t imply that you have in-depth technical knowledge. Many of these platforms offer pre-made templates to create your online shop. 

Web to print tool

One of the thing that can be really helpful for your online shop is a web to print tool. People love things that are designed especially for them. Adding a web to print tool to your website can save a lot of your money and time. First of all, you get a more automated process: people design the products by themselves, and you print and send them. You will not need to make a lot of calls or correspond for a long time to approve the design. Secondly, you get fewer returns, because web to print tool means an individual approach to each customer. Web to print tool lets you edit and manage orders efficiently. 

Moreover, it is well known that custom stickers or t-shirts, or other promotional products about Covid-19 are becoming more and more popular nowadays. So you will have a chance to offer your customers things that are in great request.

Create a marketing strategy

Even if you have a perfect website with web to print tools or other features, people will do not know about this. If you are only going to start an online business tell your existing customers about your intentions, they should be prepared. After launching your website, you should somehow claim that you are now online.

The right strategy is to start social media marketing. Social media like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more are irreplaceable for finding new customers, getting a promotion, and building a brand. Review your target audience, determine your goals, and start with amazing content. You can try paid marketing at the same time — for example, Google Ads or Facebook Ads. The more fields you try, the bigger chances to be noticed you get. 

The situation in which we are now has given us one lesson - we should be able to adapt to new conditions quickly. Transitioning from offline to an online business may cause some difficulties. We should understand that Coronavirus will come to an end. Still, you will have skills and knowledge of how to do business online. And perhaps it will be your most profitable business!

If you have any questions or need help with transitioning your web to print business online feel free to contact us.

Here is what measures we undertook to both contribute to slowing down the spread of COVID-19 and take care of our team:

1. We all switched to the full remote. Everyone is provided with the necessary equipment and is involved in the workflow.
2. We continue to work as usual and try to ensure that the pandemic situation does not affect the quality of services and the smooth running of our business.
3. We are trying to increase the awareness of our employees about hygiene, protection methods, and isolation measures.
4. Now that we all work from home, online meetings became a daily routine. We discuss the current state of LiveArt workflow, the projects as well as checking in how everyone does.

It is essential for us to support your business with an unparalleled level of service. Therefore, we monitor the situation, do our best, and stay in touch with you. Please take care of yourself, your friends, colleagues, and family. We wish you health and safety! 

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us. 

Prepare a convenient workplace

When we talk about working at the office, it means that every employee has all the necessary equipment, and their workplace is organized according to their needs. First of all, you, as a CEO, should provide them with the same conditions for remote work as they had in the office. Make sure that every employee has a laptop or a PC, uninterrupted Internet access, a working table, a quality headset for team communications, etc.

Many companies give access to sites or tools only in the office for security reasons. You need to check whether every worker can get all the required resources from home, including a VPN setup. 

Provide emotional support

Remote work could be both a way to try something new and a challenge to people. However, it puts stress twice as strong as it happens simultaneously with the COVID-19 quarantine measures. These two things, a switch to remote work and self-isolation, significantly affect emotional state and productivity. Hence it is crucial to spend more time with your employees in person and talk about the problems they face during working from home. Addressing their feelings and thoughts alleviates anxiety and allows people to focus on immediate tasks and prevent non-productive overthinking.

Tell them about your problems as well. It will become easier for them to feel that they are not alone and builds the trust you will be primarily looking for. One should also understand that adaptation to the new way of life takes some time. Getting the team back to their productive levels of work may require at least a couple of weeks, so don't expect everyone to hit your KPIs immediately.

Communicate with your team

During the isolation period, it is vital to stay connected with each other. Many companies use Slack to improve their workflows and chat between team members. It has a free plan, easy to use, and affordable. Slack allows you to create many channels for discussions, and you can separate those who do not need to be involved. Yet it creates an unnatural impression of the workflow like you are dealing with avatars, not with real people.

Therefore, it is better to use videoconferencing for meetings or just to say "Hello" or "Good morning" as if you have just come into the office to greet everyone. It might also make sense to pay attention to the informal conversation about non-working topics, so make sure that your team has enough time on this. Using a combination of Zoom and Discord would help to build team presence for the whole day.

Moreover, you can share your screen with other members. You can even leave Zoom presence open in the background to make it seem like you are in the office, working shoulder to shoulder with your mates. It creates a working atmosphere, and you can see what everyone is doing at the moment. With any voice or video conferencing tool, there is an option of voice mute so that you will not create discomfort to others. The bottom line, the more often you see each other, the easier it is to experience a transitioning period and become a genuinely remote-friendly business.

Do not forget about a daily routine

Anxiety, isolation, new place of work cause a lot of stress, and many people could even get mild depression symptoms. If you want your life to go on and stay productive during the remote period, remember that it is essential to create a working atmosphere as much as possible. One of the biggest mistakes everyone does while working at home is working from bed and staying in pajamas for the whole day. Developing a daily routine such as a morning shower, doing the hair, and dressing up differently for work helps to deal with the overwhelming exhaustion your workers would start to feel when working from home.

You may not be required to put your office outfit on, but if your team has personalized swag like hoodies with your company logo, you can all agree to wear them while you are working. These things create a productive and positive atmosphere while being fun as well. Last but not least, try to work, rest, and eat in separate places like it was in the times when office.

Set a schedule and plan the day ahead

A key to successful remote work is to stick to the working schedule. Even if your company offers flexible time, it is a common practice to agree on working hours that will be convenient for everyone, and no one will fall out of the workflow. Remote work means some freedom, but you must always consider other working factors. If you do not live alone, let your family know your working hours so that they will be more likely to respect your time.

Also, if you feel that you need a break, do the regular breaks stepping away from the computer as you did in the office. Breaks help to improve your efficiency and productivity while allowing you not to fall out of the task context.

To conclude, working at home became a big challenge for many of us. Yet taking care of your people is an opportunity to build your team as a more durable business unit. Maybe your company will even find the remote work very productive and will see the way of the working process differently once the pandemic subsides. Try to use tips you have read above as much as possible, and we hope that transitioning your business to remote work will be less stressful. Good luck!

1. Time-saving

It is truly said that time is money. Product design software gives automation to the whole process. Customers can choose the product they want to personalize, add text, choose artwork, or use pre-design templates, and place the order in a few clicks. No long queues and irritated customers. Everyone can order the product anytime and anywhere. The only thing you will need to do is to process the order, make a product according to the client's reference and send it.

For example, you can create a premade template for a business card and your customers will only need to enter their name, job title, and address into these fields.

2. Fewer outcomes per material

One of the popular approaches of printing business owners is to produce some amount of custom-designed products and try selling them. However, how do you know how many goods you should produce? Sometimes, this may lead to unsold items and money lost. To prevent this, you can allow your customers to personalize products by themselves. This is the ideal moment, where online product designer can be indispensable.

Having this tool in your shop can reduce the number of unused goods because all orders occurred only on an as-needed basis. No matter what kind of product you sell - uniforms, t-shirts, business cards, stickers, or any promotional products. You will not need to produce a large number of products in the hope that someone will buy this. 

There one another good point from a marketing perspective. Being eco-friendly is a trend nowadays. So you can easily drive more engagement and attention to your brand. 

3. Faster processing of customer design order

Web to print tool cut down on communication and the order process. Instant design proof allows your customers to make sure that they order what they need and enable you to make sure that you perform the order correctly. You do not need to spend your time figuring out the design, size, text placement, or product color. Everything is described on the output files which contains the whole design preview.

These tools are compatible with a lot of shopping cart systems like Foxycart, WooCommerce, Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce, and others. Thus, you can easily manage your orders by having the customer's address, output files, amount and product, and its size, and even some customer's notes.

4. Fewer refunds

Unfortunately, during communicating with the client regarding the product design they want sometimes you can understand them incorrectly. The human factor is the most common cause of errors in any field. In the printing industry can be a lot of human errors because all the process is done manually.

Imagine, that you printed the design and sent the product to the client. And... they asked refund because the design does not meet their needs. With the web to print software, you can avoid this unpleasant situation for both of you. How? Every customer can check all changes in the live preview, so you can follow the design proof during printing. In short, the customer gets what he sees. 

To conclude, having a product design tool can be beneficial for your business. Imagine that you can spend saved money on marketing strategy or improvements for your website and gain more customers. You will not know until you try. If you have decided to take your business to the next level, feel free to contact us.

Leads don’t become your customers

If you provide bad customer service for your leads, you will never get desired conversions. Imagine that your lead filled the feedback form or asked about buying your products and need to wait for a long time or, in the worst case, never hear back. Will this lead come back again to your site or write to you again? You know the answer. Every lead wants to be heard and needed. The best practice is to answer them within 24 hours. Do not forget to show your interest, say thanks, and try to solve your lead’s problem if needed.

Loss of reputation and respect

Your brand reputation is essential for your printing business. In the case of bad customer experience, this is the first thing to suffer. If you are not listening to your customers carefully or you are not ready to deal with their problems, they will quickly share their feelings with others. For example, negative reviews on trusted sites or social media posts. This information will spread rapidly with others, and the entire world will consider your business as the most terrible. 

They will choose your competitors 

If your customers are displeased by your brand, they will go to your competitors, who offer more qualitative and trustworthy service. As a result, you lose your website traffic. Gaining back the trust of customers who have chosen your competitor is challenging and very hard.

You can lose your employees

If your brand reputation leaves much to be desired, your employees will consider quitting the job and finding more worthy. Imagine, you risk losing not only customers but also people who work with you. Sounds scary, right?

Good customer experience is vital for businesses that have built their brand name and for those who only start their way. Try to know your customers, create an emotional connection with them, and take into account every feedback. 

3D Printing

Business owners consider the potential value of 3D printing. It is fast and accessible. It is reshaping all the industries around so that you can add value for your web to print business. In the past, customers had to wait a week to get the product and chose the company based on how quickly it can deliver the product. So to stay competitive many printing companies try to embed 3D printing to create and deliver products quickly.

Personalization

Consumer behavior has changed during the last years. Now purchased process requires more personalized experience. Customers want to buy products designed by themselves. Therefore web to print companies offer templates, add features for customization: custom text or own artwork, for example.

Web to print software providers

Business owners now are partners with web2print software providers. Complete solutions they offer power up eCommerce business by adding web to print storefront. This partnership helps customers to track the shipping progress, increases the convenience of the design process and makes transactions easier. We can expect extensive growth of e-Commerce in 2020 and respective web to print companies are ready to offer their services. 

AI

Artificial Intelligence is getting into every aspect of our lives. The use of AI in the printing industry improves customer experience by offering customized direct mails, screen printing, real-time data, algorithms that reduce humans errors, and network security. With the power of AI, you can handle manual jobs like order processing, quality check, printing and more.

Sustainable printing

Due to the high level of carbon emission footprint printing and packaging industries try to reduce it. Being eco-friendly is a trend nowadays. Paper bottles, recycled paper, the treeless paper will rule in 2020. The main goal of printing industries is to add sustainability to the process, and they can easily do this because you only print what you need and when you need it.  

To sum up, this is not an end list of the printing industry trends, because it is constantly growing. There are many to uncover and try, so we need to keep up with developments. What is the most attractive trend for you?

Use a product customization tool

It is tough to impress and make your prospect to stay on your site. A product customization tool on your web to print shop can really draw attention. Customers love personalized things. So a good web to print store is the one that allows its customers to design products on their own, no matter it is stickers designs or t-shirts.

Make it fast and user-friendly

If your storefront’s page takes longer than three seconds to load, be prepared that your customers will leave this. It would help if you understood that browsing experience plays a prominent role. Also, make sure that your storefront is user-friendly with an intuitive interface. Your customers should clearly understand how they can view, order, and buy goods. Moreover, your online web to print store should be optimized for tablets, mobiles, and desktop users. 

Ready templates

Ready templates can be your wild card. If you provide it, your customers will never look for the alternatives. Not everyone has a design idea. Moreover, not everyone has sufficient time. So, your customers need ready-made templates that can be printed on the t-shirts, business cards, stickers, or any product they want to customize. 

Use digital marketing

Social media is a powerful tool to get more leads and increase the number of your customers. Facebook and Instagram can help you grow awareness and brand visibility. Create business pages, post engaging content, be useful for your audience, and you will establish your business reputation.

Maintain good relationships

If your customer is satisfied, then you are on the way to your goal. Try to meet your customer’s needs and desires. Be helpful, polite, and friendly, and they will appreciate this. Also, you can do giveaways or offer discounts for regular buyers.

Support

Offer your customers 24/7 support because one bad shopping experience can cause provoke them to choose your competitor. You can deal with your clients by email, live chat, and phones. Try to solve their problems as much as possible. Besides, remember about time and geographical differences, these should not affect your service. 

Online business is something like a challenge. But if you try to apply changes from time to time, you can see what influence your business the most. Do your best and see the result. If you need assistance with the tips mentioned above, you can contact us.

All of these things have an impact on your prospects. In most cases, people think that having a custom product builder integrated with popular eCommerce platforms is enough. Using the Magento product designer tool requires the implementation of practices that can market your Magento web to print business successfully. 

Feel it as a customer

Before you start selling any product or service to others, use it yourself. Does your business service solve the problem of your target audience? Do you like the design? Is it convenient for you to use the online store? In other words, is it user-friendly? Using your service as your customer, you may identify missed points and therefore improve it in these respective areas. 

Optimize it

If you want people to notice you, you need to make it easy to find you. To get more visitors through organic search, you should optimize your online store to the latest SEO standards. Use organic keywords, prepare useful content for your audience, create a positive user experience, optimize your website for conversions. Moreover, you can try to do it simultaneously with paid marketing. This tactic will create a better relationship between your online web to print store and search engine. 

Be valuable

Take care of your customers. Useful guides or tips can help you get more engagement and increase your audience. If they know that helpful information appears on your site regularly, they come back again and again. For example, you can tell them how to match the custom t-shirt with other clothes. 

Share on social media

Pay attention to promoting your Magento web to print store in social media. Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, Quora, and Pinterest rule our world. People spend their time there for the whole day, so it is an excellent chance for you to build and spread your brand’s name.

Use video marketing

People find it easier to perceive information through video than through text. Therefore, you can use the power of YouTube and create exciting videos and explain more about who you are, what your product is, and how it can be useful for your customers. Do not forget about entertaining content. 

Do you have an online web to print store? Feel free to contact us to integrate our Magento online design software.

Customers appreciate things that are made just for them

When you have a choice to buy the mass market thing or purchase something that is tailored to you, apparently you will choose the second one, because you can feel more in control. So, If you allow your customers to buy custom products they want, they will value it and definitely will come back again. Product customization delivers customer experience and increases customer loyalty and satisfaction. Thus, it is a proven business strategy that will drive regular customers, not one-time ones.

Your customers are different

No matter what you sell: online products or physical, you should know that your customers have various needs and desires. Understanding that your customers are different is essential when you create a product that can be liked by many people. When you want to create a product for everyone, you will just create it for no one. The perfect solution is to customize your product to fit different segments of customers instead of being generally suitable. To correctly identify your potential customization opportunities, create user personas. In this way, you can genuinely understand your customer’s pains, goals, and needs. 

Increase personalized experience

When you place the design process in the hands of your customers, you give them an opportunity to choose the desired color, textures, artwork, add text, and much more. The more custom options you provide, the more valuable and fascinating customer experience you get. You create a connection between the buyer and the product, in this way, your brand grows. 

Increase competitiveness

Selling products that are unique make you more competitive on the market. Moreover, customers are willing to pay up to 20% more for custom products. So that delivering your customers what accurately they seek is a proven way to increase sales. Once you claim your company as a brand that offers unique products, your competitors will need to strive to catch up with you. 

To sum up, it is vital for your business to be able to compete in today’s market. The only marketing strategy may not be enough. You should deeply understand to whom you are selling. Personalization is a perfect way to learn about your customers and their needs and finally become popular and demanded on the market.