Direct Marketing News

Here’s the Insider Secret that no one will tell you about (except me).

The single, biggest mistake most business owners and managers make is giving all the printing work to the same printer over & over again.

With most commercial services like accounting, IT, Travel Agents, stationery suppliers, etc you can pretty much find one supplier and stick with them. Returning time & time again, knowing what you’re getting is probably as good as it gets.

But commercial printing is an entirely different kettle of fish.

Ever wondered why the quotes that you get back from various printing companies, for the same job, are all very different. If you ask say 6 printing companies to quote on the same job, the difference between the highest and the lowest price can be quite substantial.

I personally have seen some quotes come in at over 70% higher than the lowest quote.

Or you may ask the same 6 printing companies to quote on your annual printing requirements which may range from business cards to letterheads to company reports. When you start sorting the quotes you find that the prices are all over the shop. Some companies are much better priced on some of the documents yet way over on others. One company may be cheaper on the reports & more expensive on letterheads and the next company may be the other way round.

Does this strike you as odd?

Why is it so?

Well it’s not as mystical as you may think.

Apart from the fact that some printers, at any given point in time, will be low on work so they may well quote a rediculas price to get your order. Or it may be a quiet time of year, ie just after Christmas so once again some printers will quote low to win the business.

Or it could be a result of -

The insider secret that no one will tell you about.

<p>Please bare in mind before you read on, I had to shoot the last person I told the secret to… just kidding.

Read on.

Printing presses are configured to suit the buyer’s requirements. They can be ordered as a single colour press, a 2 colour press, a 4 colour press and right the way up to a 10 colour press & more.

They can also be ordered in different sizes. You can order an A4, A3, A2 & A1 sizes and each increment in size and the number of colours a press can print represents a substantial increase in price.

A single colour A4 press may cost as little as $50,000 whereas on the other end of the scale a 10 colour A1 press may cost $1.5 million.

So you can understand why the owners are a little sneaky at lease payment time.

Anyway, to use an extreme example, it’s obvious to a blind man that the cost of printing 1,000 black A4 letterheads on an A4 single colour press would be substantially cheaper to say the least than printing them on an A1 10 colour press.

And this is the reason for widely varying prices.

The vast majority of printing companies generally gear-up to service a specific market section, loosely described as the small offset market up to the large full colour market. So it’s important when choosing a printing company to be aware of the equipment they have or a minimum, the section of the market they cater for.

If you have issues with this somewhat tedious task, you can simply contact a printing broker who’ll place your orders with the most suitable printing company thereby saving you money. And… they’ll do all the dirty work so you don’t have to.

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