A comparatively small outlay can open up a wide range of applications.
Personalised promotional items such as mugs, mouse mats and stationery can be useful both as a way of promoting your business to customers, and as a service offering in their own right.
The walls of the meeting room at TheMagicTouch in Dunstable are adorned with so many objects that it brings to mind the old conveyor belt on The Generation Game when trying to remember what was or was not there: mugs, mouse mats, t-shirts, footwear, padded folders, sports apparel, electric guitar, cuddly toy…
Actually there might not be a cuddly toy, but there is no reason why there shouldn’t be: TheMagicTouch says it can print onto pretty much anything using its transfer papers, printing systems from OKI, and a heat press.
Jim Nicol, managing director of TheMagicTouch in the UK, points to a £2000 A4 OKI printer and says: ‘Everything in this room was printed with that little printer.’ He lets that sink in for a moment and then continues: ‘We struggle to get near a £5000 order, even if someone buys everything. If you come here to spend £2000 to £3000 though, just make sure you’ve got maybe another £500, which is the equivalent of perhaps 250 t-shirts to give away. We encourage all of our customers to do that – produce samples to give away. You should say to the client: there are no artwork costs or set up costs, the minimum order is one, and the first one is free. The ratio of success is 10%, so if you send out 10 t-shirts you will get an order.’
Give-aways? Surely not! But yes, that is exactly what he means. Not just any give-aways, but personalised ones. This is about making money, looking after your existing clients, and having a little fun along the way, and the financial outlay to get started (see above) is really not much in the grand scheme of things.
Mr Nicol is a man that does not hesitate to speak his mind. He says he believes that he will automatically get someone’s full attention if he can give them something that is personalised to them. He says that printers must look at such opportunities with their existing clients, because these clients are their biggest assets and they have not been great at making them feel special over the years.
‘If you can increase your business with your existing clients by 10% a year, in seven years you will have doubled your business. Our print suppliers don’t pay attention to us; they don’t look at our website and say ‘you have an exhibition coming up, have you thought about this?’ If you put your customers’ logo or name on a diary, there will be some sort of communication. It takes away that thing of only having contacted them to get an order. There’s no artwork cost, no set up cost, the minimum order is one and the first one is free. Every single person I have said that to has smiled and accepted the free product. No Google Adword does that.’
This is a solution that any print company, of whatever size, can look to implement. It can help them to engage with their customers in friendlier ways, with a bit of wellplaced humour maybe, helping to pick up more work for their production presses as well as being a standalone service in its own right.
It is even possible for people to run such a small business from home. TheMagicTouch has hundreds of people working like this; it calls them the 5 to 9ers: they get home from work at 5pm and work for a few hours on their other business.
It is not just items such as mugs and mouse mats that should be considered. Another market with excellent potential is work wear. There is no stigma attached these days to a small business kitting out staff with polo shirts bearing the company name and logo. Give the customer one for nothing and see where it takes you. Also, employee award plaques – sales, training, employee of the month; there are opportunities here too.
‘We know we are not the total solution but people can just use this as ammunition for their people to help generate new business, and there’s nothing easier,’ Mr Nicol continued. ‘A lot of people are scratching about, but they have all got existing clientsand they could just pop in the car and deliver them a personalised mug. We can sell a system for doing mugs that does not cost much more than an Xbox.’
The OKI systems that TheMagicTouch sells alongside its transfer papers and heat presses have been converted to work with white toner, which has opened up more potential applications on black and coloured materials.
This is the cutting edge in terms of transfer technology, and the company sells the aforementioned £2000 A4 device, and a £6000 A3 device, though few customers have needed the larger system. Not everyone wants to print onto darker substrates though, and they should not be discouraged by even these comparatively modest price tags, since they can buy a system for £500 that will very likely meet their needs.
Mr Nicol laughs at the focus the industry has on technology that the vast majority of people within it will never be able to afford. ‘People don’t care about things like Landa, and Heidelberg and Fujifilm becoming partners. They are more interested in paying their salaries, their rent and their business rates this month. They are desperate for new ideas, but they don’t want to have to secure their business against their house to buy kit, or be paying £700 interest a month on a piece of kit they are not even busy on.
‘Printers are struggling to sell more print, and they need to offer their customers more. They need to exploit their existing clients, because if they don’t, someone else will. Printers always get motivated to get into sales and marketing when they have just lost their best customer. I feel that we are the perfect synergy for the print industry. We are like the cavalry but at such a low price range.’
The challenge is that people must invest time also. They must be prepared to do something different; to spend an hour going through their records, finding customers that have not bought anything for a year, doing ten mugs and two days later making ten calls. It will work though, Mr Nicol insists, it will work.
