Posted by 
Archived in In follow up to last week’s brochure design tips, we thought we’d discuss why you should consider printing your brochures digitally, rather than rely on good old lithographic.
Digital is being hailed as a revolution for small business’ print marketing: compared to litho, digital is quick, often cheaper and can deliver messages personalised to your customers’ interests.
Why is digital printing different to lithographic?
Traditional litho ‘offset’ printing requires the creation of a plate for every print, which is then used to transfer the image via a rubber blanket onto the paper.
Litho is great for printing 1000s of catalogues, magazines and books at a relative low cost. But its cost is less attractive when you’re only after a few hundred brochures and flyers.
Digital printers, on the other hand, don’t require the creation of a plate. Instead they use software to render digital images directly onto the press, bypassing the need for an expensive plate altogether. This offers numerous benefits…
What are the benefits of digital printing?
Cheaper – without the need to create a plate for every image, small businesses can print small quantities of brochures, flyers and business cards cheaply. There are already a few web-to-print businesses (such as moonpig.com and lulu.com) that have sprung up to capitalise on the low cost of small, customised print runs.
Faster – each litho print run takes a long time to setup. Digital presses, however, can be setup quickly and are capable of enabling next day, or even same day delivery.
Greener – the elimination of a plate, and shorter make-ready, means you also don’t need all the other printing materials and waste that go along with them. So you no longer have chemicals, ink and paper filling up your bin; and because you only print what you need, less chance of obsolescence. Some digital printing machines are even designed with their own recyclability in mind.
Customisable – every print can be customised to include unique content, such as the customer’s name, personalised URL and relevant images. Personalising marketing helps improve the response rate because people are more likely to engage with content that’s relevant to their interests. Litho, on the other hand, only allows a static ‘one size fits all’ message per print run.
High quality – the quality of digital printers is rapidly improving, and is almost indistinguishable from traditional litho. Their reliability is also getting better, and eventually they’ll be just as consistent, and competitive, at long print runs too.
Digital printing puts one-to-one marketing into customers’ hands
Digital print has opened up print marketing to small businesses by making it cost effective to deliver timely, relevant and personalised messages. This is the type of marketing weary consumers are crying out for, so digital print technology has arrived at just the right time.
Here at bda we’ve experienced first hand the benefits digital print offers for one-to-one marketing. In a recent campaign for Siemens, digital printing enabled us to create individual brochures personalised to match the responses customers logged on their website. This enabled Siemens to not only deliver marketing finely tuned to their customers’ interests, but also saved cash because they only needed to print what was requested, rather than end up with a pile of unwanted brochures gathering dust.
Litho still has a role to play in printing mass produced materials. But for fast, cost effective and personalised one-to-one print marketing, you have to go digital.
_______________________________
BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.
September 24th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
[...] (personalised URLs) we can create websites customised for each individual prospect, and then use variable data printing to send them personalised promotions based on every click and page [...]