“To leave a lasting impression on your customers, leave something that remains with them even after the purchase.”
This applies to you and your B2B customers as well. Because they are looking for ways to provide their customers with personalized service.
And when it comes to personalization, what could be better than leaving a great impression. For you, it can be a print service that gives your corporate customers the ease of designing, purchasing, and printing in one place. For them, a personalized service can be a logo on the pen, mugs, brochures, company t-shirts, etc.
In this regard, your web to print software can be their best tool. It can offer your B2B customers a lot more than convenience and payment options. They can create unique designs, build their brand, upscale their business, and do much more.
However, converting B2B customers to members is not as easy as said. They require quality services, experienced hands, and advanced features. And so, in this article, we will show how you can win them over.
Before we head towards winning B2B customers with our best printing service practices, let us see their pain points.
Common Challenges B2B Customers Face
B2B customers generally have high expectations from customer-centric eCommerce solutions. They want a flair of professionalism with services that a personal buyer leverages – efficiency and ease of use.
However, their needs differ, and therein lies the challenges that they face while printing their products.
1. Brand Inconsistency
Corporate customers need to display their business. But, sometimes, they fail to add the elements that would define their business accurately.
For example, different colour shades, or logos that don’t match the brand style. Instead, they design their logos, pamphlets, products with inconsistent themes, and poor design graphics.
Later, if they try to improve it they don’t have the wireframe of the design they can use. Sometimes, the design requires editing from scratch, making it challenging to maintain brand consistency. And this tiny thing hampers their productivity. Customers find it difficult to recognize them online and offline.
2. Delay in Order Fulfillment
B2B buying involves many decision-makers and a large and complicated process. Even for designing a logo, they spend most of their time listing all the requirements and searching for a freelance designer.
After the research, it takes management additional time to finalize, discuss, and pass on the details to the external designer. All this process results in a delay in printing fulfilment.
3. High Cost
Many B2B businesses have their own set of marketing people to plan, design, and create flyers, pamphlets, sales, product designs, and to help them create their copies.
There are a few, the startups or the ones on the low budget, who don’t have a team. They are compelled to hire external designers to design their products and other specifics, who may charge them double the actual rate.
Thus, to avoid the extra cost, they restore the stock images and compromise their product/service authenticity and originality.
4. Miscommunication or Lack of Communication
Corporate customers have to stay in touch with the designers to get the final designs on time. Even after that, sometimes, it is the designer who delays. Other times, it is the printer waiting for the plans, highlighting the issues of improper sizes and materials.
If it is a bulk requirement with a time constraint, it may result in low-quality output.
Customer support, complex procurement process, adaptive searching, shipment and pricing transparency, etc. are the other challenges that corporate buyers face. To help them, your web to print software can act as a “one for all” solution for all the printing requirement challenges.
How your Web to Print Software can Attract Corporate Customers
A web to print storefront consists of features that can help B2B customers. But for that, you need to go for a solution that includes:
1. Product Customization
Web to print storefronts with a product design tool helps your customers design and print their products anytime. It also comes with extensive libraries, vectors, clipart, images, and fonts for users to choose from.
With customization features, you can enable your corporate customers to make the design changes on their own. For instance, even after uploading the flyer design, they can change its dimensions whenever required.
The best part is that they don’t need to rely on different printers for different materials. Also, they can add unique elements that match their business. As they can customize everything, they don’t need to spend extras on different printers and services.
2. Brand Building
We already saw how brand inconsistency could hamper businesses. Therefore, your web to print software must allow your customers to save their designs, templates, logos, banners, and other design drafts and material for later.
This “save for later” and “access it anytime” feature would guarantee customers a consistent print quality. Plus, the extensive library of readymade templates and easy customization features at every stage can simplify their work during the final step.
3. Real-time Quotation Sharing
To win the B2B corporate customers, you need to help them make quick decisions. It is possible with an automated quotation that includes all the requirement details, estimated cost, and delivery date.
A web to print software enables them to upload their requirements, add details such as the number of items, type of materials, different sizes, etc., and provides an instant quote. This reduces B2B customers’ back and forth communication, continuous calls, mail trails, etc.
The instant quote feature allows them to make quick purchase decisions.
4. Instant Design Approval
A web2print solution allows your customers to upload any pre-designed artwork or use templates available with the designer tool. Your customers don’t need to get into lengthy conversations with designers and printers to explain their requirements. For instance, change the colour shade, reduce the size, use this type of material, or so on.
All these are mentioned in the system, so customers can directly get their designs ready, approve them, and pass them for printing.
5. Easy Order Placement
Self-service means giving your customers the freedom to order quickly. It is possible if you have a fully functional e-store. A web-to-print storefront is an amalgamation of eCommerce features with a designer tool and others.
It provides an easy-to-use customizable storefront, readymade, and customizable templates for marketing and printing collaterals, shopping carts, product catalogues, and self-checkout processes.
This eCommerce website feature gives them an authentic personal shopping experience. Further, it removes their B2B time-consuming habit of talking to multiple sales reps before making a final purchase.
6. Auto Price Calculation
Often the price discussed at the initial stage of designing changes to something different at the final step. It may be because of the material type, items, printing method, design customization, and so. All of this may cost the price to double or triple.
When it comes to B2B, budget plays a major role. They have to be conscious of spending money. Thus, they need an auto-calculation feature that will give them the exact idea of the price based on different factors.
A web to print store can provide them with a similar experience. It calculates the price based on different colours, number of items, and area designs and provides estimation in the initial stage.
7. Bulk Orders in Less Time
Many printing businesses have a specified limit of printing volume. This is frustrating for corporate clients who want large volumes in a limited time.
They can’t keep giving repeat orders like 100 in the first consignment and then 100 in the second, especially when they need all the 200 copies at one time. Even if they did receive it, it might result in delay or poor quality, which is not acceptable.
Your web to print software overcomes this challenge. It allows your customers to place unlimited orders within a few clicks. Besides, it allows printing of any number of copies, be it 4 or 200. There’s no minimum or maximum limit to the print copies.
8. Order Management
A web to print software allows easy integration of ERP solutions to streamline business processing. With tools like inventory manager and order manager, your customers can add the orders and track them with minimum support.
They can view their shipment and delivery details from their account. Further, without contacting the sales team, they can cancel the order and repeat it at any time.
On the other hand, you can use an inventory manager to manage your products and highlight the out-of-stocks.
9. Customer Support
Customers want everything in one place. An online platform can provide them with a one-stop solution for all their design and print requirements, just like Amazon.
They can choose their designs, customize them, place orders, cancel them, and do all sorts of activities without contacting the sales rep. Moreover, they can order any number of copies, thereby eliminating the traditional printing approach that requires a minimum copy for printing.
The other advantage of the solution is that you can help your customers through FAQs, informational blogs and articles, a live chat support system, and more.
10. Feedback, Ratings, and Reviews
For B2B customers, there’s nothing like “let’s try this business this time.” While purchasing a pen or printing a business banner, they look for an authentic, experienced vendor who delivers quality. The best way to find one is to check the vendors’ ratings and reviews. Learn what other customers say about their services.
It’s best to have a web to print solution with rating and review tools. It helps your customers to find you quickly and choose you over others.
The feature has two more advantages: ratings and reviews will help your business be transparent. Besides, customers won’t have second thoughts before choosing you. It would be easy for them to make decisions.
11. Backend Support
A web to print solution comes with an admin panel that gives insights about the order details at once. These details can help your corporate customers coordinate with you for fast order delivery.
This admin panel will give them a detailed overview of their orders and keep track of their business.
What More Can You Do
To win B2B customers, you can integrate different third-party tools with your web to print software.
You can add a designer tool, advanced features like other shipping methods, colour shades, templates for customization, mobile responsiveness, export files, reminders to order, and more. Or simply put, bring in a web to print solution that provides a convenient, straightforward experience.
Mr. Pratik Shah is Creative Head of Brush Your Ideas, a Web-to-Print technology solution offering custom product design tools and Web-to-Print Storefront Solutions. He has been giving his valuable tips and suggestion about the Product Designer Tool.
