Last week APDSP sponsored a webinar that featured three leading providers of web sites for reprographics shops: Printer Presence, Print Science, and Repro Connect. If you want to watch the webinar, just click here or on the image above.
We’ve gathered 9 tips from the webinar here:
1) Limit the number of fields you have on your online forms. “Reducing the amount of fields that you have on forms can increase your conversion rate by up to 120 percent,” said Molly Coke, vice president of support services at Firespring, the company that offers PrinterPresence. “Keeping your forms straightforward is really important so that people can communicate with you.”
2) Give your customers the option of ordering online, not just seeing your products. “Giving customers the option to order online can give them a seamless way to find your products and help you to complete the projects. Our clients see an average increase in revenue of 30 percent when they offer online ordering through their site,” Coke said.
3) Create portals for your customers. “Show your customers some love and really secure your relationship with them by creating a password protected portal,” Coke said. “We've found that it's a great upsell tool with existing clients. Clients log in and they have all information that's unique to them [and see] catalogs of items that they reorder often.”
4) When you run a promotion, make the link go to a “landing page” that is specific to that promotion rather than just to your home URL. “Visitors who enter website through a landing page are 10 times more likely to convert than if they start on your homepage,” Coke said. “With a landing page, you're creating one centralized call to action within a page… so they're connecting the message that they saw with the specific landing page and then you're 10 times as likely to get that conversion right there on that landing page.”
5) Make sure your site works well on all devices. “You want your website to look great no matter what device someone is using to find you, whether it be their desktop computer, their tablet, their mobile device,” Coke said.
6) Make it easy for users to get prices and submit orders from your site, said John Weissberg, owner of Print Science. This means that you should have built-in calculators that can quickly provide pricing information to customers. “One of the things we've noticed, particularly in the repro business, is that the repro business is filled with printing a very large number of very low margin jobs,” Weissberg said. “And it is extremely important when you're dealing with large quantities of low margin jobs that you do everything efficiently. So the idea is to give the customer a real convenience, allow the customers to find their type of product, get a price quote, upload their files, and then go through the checkout process.”
If you have accurate calculators on your site, you’ll discover that it’s not just your customers who use them. “If you build into your website as we do, very accurate pricing calculators, not only your customers use your pricing calculators, but actually your CSRs use your pricing calculators. What we find is that a potential customer calls up on the phone, the CSRs automatically open up the website and start to give quotations directly from the website,” he said. “So, we have different calculators that can analyze whether the document is black and white or color and allow you to charge different prices for black and white and color. We have different ones that can detect what is the percentage of ink coverage on every single page in every one of the files.”
7) Promote your specialty products online. For example, if you live in an area that celebrates Mardi Gras, promote Mardi Gras signage with Google AdWords or other promotions to drive traffic to your site. “If you plan this out one or two months beforehand and you start placing some internet ads, and you start creating some content pages, your site will actually come up very strongly when people [search for that term],” Weissberg said. “Just to take an example, imagine you were a printer down in New Orleans and Mardi Gras was rolling around, well, people are going to be searching a month beforehand for Mardi Gras this and Mardi Gras that, and if you've done a nice job with your website, you will actually get some very serious sales from that kind of thing.”
8) Make your file upload capability as smooth as possible. “Improving just this one piece will easily result in more print orders coming in through your website,” said Joseph Szobody, president of ReproConnect. He offered several tips on this topic:
* Stop using Java or Flash plugins as upload tools. “It's like having a customer walk in the door and come up to your front counter and you tell them, ‘Sorry, you have to be wearing a polka dotted shirt to come in here and do business with us. Please go get one first.’”
* Don’t use upload apps that place restrictions on the size of the upload. “It's 2020 folks. Web browsers can handle massive files. Ensure your website doesn't get in the way of large or high-resolution print orders. That high-resolution Illustrator file, even when saved to PDF, is a lot bigger than 100 meg. If you want that banner order, or that yard sign order, whatever it might be, that's going to be a problem. It's costing you print business.”
* Don’t use a cheap, generic upload form like JotForm, Hightail or Dropbox. “These solutions almost always will let you down at some point, whether it's an upload error, or a file size limit, or … just flat out not even loading. This is where cutting a few bucks will ultimately backfire and cost you print business.”
* Don’t make a customer upload files one at a time. “It's like if [a customer] brought in a stack of paper to your front counter and you said, ‘No, I'm sorry, sir, you have to go back out to your car and bring them in one piece of paper at a time.’”
* Make it easy for customers to find your upload application. “When someone goes to your website, can they immediately find how to get you files? Don't make them scroll down and dig through the footer to find an email address, which is still not a great way to send you files. It should be front and center.”
9) Make sure everything about your web site and associated apps looks professional. “From start to finish, you should have a professional branded image that represents your company,” Szobody says. “Customers want email confirmation, they want to know that you got their order and that you're working on it, and that should reflect your company. It should contain basic information like, ‘Hey, if you have any questions, here is our phone number.’ If this is a pickup order, ‘Here's our address.’ Simple, basic things that can go such a long way.”