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Does Printing Matter Any More In The 21st Century?

Author: Mohammad Shahid
by Mohammad Shahid
Posted: Aug 17, 2018

In this digital age one might be forgiven for thinking that printing is losing importance, as people spend more and more time on social media. To some extent it is true that the internet has had an effect on printing. For instance, we can buy a book online and download it on to our tablet or laptop and read it that way. Furthermore, if you are an avid reader you still can't lug 50 books about with you when you get on the train to work in the morning, but you can have 50 books on your tablet if you wish.

So, yes, it's true that fewer books are being physically printed. It is also true that direct mail – sending a letter in an envelope with marketing content inside it has dropped considerably. Many companies build email lists of customers and prospective customers and market to them with emails. The beauty of that is that you can send a marketing message to 1,000 people or 100,000 people and it costs exactly the same: nothing! You can get a lot of traffic to your website that way.

However, getting a lot of traffic won't do you any good unless it is targeted traffic, that is, people who are interested in what you are selling. If you have 100,000 visitors to your website and none of them buys anything you could have saved yourself the trouble of composing the email.

This is where printing services in Edinburgh can help you beat your competition. You can use direct mail to market to a select list of people who are interested in what you are selling, and the much smaller number of businessmen who are still using direct mail today are absolutely crushing it.

You might ask why. First, because you can buy lists of people who are interested in your product or services and you can get a comparatively enormous response. If you stop to think about it, we used to get direct mail every day from one company or another, but many of those have emigrated to the internet. Far less letters are dropping through our letter boxes. When we DO get a letter, addressed to us personally, these days it is going to get opened and read. You don't need to send out vast quantities of direct mail either. Some marketers are selling a product for, say, £47.00, sending out a 500 direct mail shot, and getting sales as high as 40%!! If you only get half that, that is still getting on for a £5,000 return for a mail shot which perhaps cost £750 to print and post, including the cost of renting the list of names. Now suppose you sell a £97 product or £497 product.

Print is actually all around us. Leaflets come piling through our front doors, along with the little post we get (usually bills), almost daily. A local farm shop advertising special offers, a furniture shop showing the latest armchair, a local estate agent offering to sell our home in three days flat, or whatever. These people simply wouldn't keep doing it if they were not getting results. They might not get returns of 40%, but it is still profitable for them.

Take a trip down to the High Street. Look at your Iceland store. Printed posters offering special deals in every window. Standing on the street corner is an individual handing out leaflets persuading you to join his church, vote for his party, take in unwanted cats or dogs, or a whole long list of other things. It's all print.

Pop into your local library. There are several thousand books – all printed – some several years old, but many published only very recently. Go shopping at Tesco's. All those little price tags along the shelves, including the ones apologising for the empty shelf because stock has sold out, have been printed. So have the posters on the walls and hanging from the ceiling. Every last item of food wrapping has been printed, and a lot of it very recently because it has a "use by" date on it which may only be a week away. So the producers have to keep printing the labels on a continuing basis.

It is fairly safe to say that printing is not going to go away any time soon.

About the Author

Crescent Print Edinburgh Ltd are printing services in Edinburgh meeting all of your digital and lithographic print needs.

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Author: Mohammad Shahid

Mohammad Shahid

Member since: Aug 17, 2018
Published articles: 9

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