5 Ways Online Printing Keeps You Resilient (with Real-World Examples)

If there is one constant in today’s world, it is that nothing is constant. Whether your business is scaling with venture capital money, you are responding to altered market needs, or you are trying to communicate with employees and customers about organizational changes, staying in touch with the right people at the right time is harder than ever. Especially since many consumers report digital fatigue.

Because this month will look different than next month – and next year will seem even more drastically changed – the days of printing tens of thousands of copies of a brochure are long gone. Instead, smart businesses are turning to online print services to stay resilient. Read on for five reasons why more business owners, marketers, administrators, and even educators are choosing online print shops.

5 Ways Online Printing Keeps You Resilient (With Real-Life Examples)

1. Respond to Real-Time Changes with Fast Turnaround

Traditionally, print jobs take a long time to set up. Whether trusting a local copy shop, a large internal print facility, or your own trusty personal printer, your print experience might include botched test jobs, lengthy email chains, and multiple weeks’ lead time to execute the project.

Printing online reduces your print job to a couple of minutes instead of a couple of days or weeks. Instead of emailing back and forth with a vendor, you are in control from the very start. That includes uploading your final files, choosing customizations, and placing the order to your final destination. With Mimeo’s online document printing services, you also get a real-time preview of each document so you can skip the physical proof process.

Online prints like this enable you to respond to real-time changes. That could include updating safety information to reflect updated health guidelines, changing out restaurant menus according to food supply, or even buying you more time to submit hard copy business proposals or branded event collateral.

Here’s a real-world example: Spring Venture Group is a healthcare technology company with new hires almost every week. Because the healthcare industry experiences frequent changes – such as regulations or new entrants to the market – the training team has to update their new hire materials at least twice a month. Before switching to a print online model, the training manager had to set aside several hours every Friday to complete the updates. Now, he makes the updates Monday morning, and the new hires order the printed manuals themselves online. 

2. Stay Nimble with Low-Volume Runs

Online print services also keep you resilient because you can order prints at a low volume. That’s because instead of relying on traditional offset print technology, online print services plug into digital printers that don’t require any set up. Instead of getting locked into a minimum order quantity, you can order as few as 1 copy at the same per-unit price as 1,000. 

For a business responding to challenges, this online print model is friendly to both your budget and your campaigns. When welcoming new hires, you can order a small run of business cards with next day delivery, rather than waiting six weeks for a large batch. When planning events, you can experiment with booklets, printed catalogs, and brochures that are specific to the event, location, or campaign. 

In another example, Boreas Campers relies on online services for custom printed manuals. Since they sell camper vehicles, their owner manuals need to be high-end and thorough. They order owner manuals online so that they can easily pair updated content with new orders.

3. Save Time with Shipping to Multiple Locations

When using a local print shop or internal print facility, the printer usually doesn’t offer shipping as part of their services. That means that someone on your team has to waste time picking up printed documents, boxing them up, and shipping them to your final destination. When you have multiple locations to mail to, this adds up to a huge waste of time and money.

Since an online document printing service doesn’t assume their customers are local, they always print and deliver documents to final destinations. That means when you place your order for training materials, marketing collateral, sales literature, or other printed documents, you can check that item off your to-do list without having to worry about national or international shipping. 

With Mimeo printing services, you can even deliver directly to residences within the USA via FedEx or USPS. That’s one of the reasons why Roxbury Prep Charter School turned to online printing via Mimeo when they needed to deliver textbooks to students’ residences in early spring of 2020. 

4. Get the Right Information to the Right People at the Right Time

When dealing with change, it is important that you can get the right information to the right people at the right time. 

Online print shops make this easy by offering fast turnaround on standard offerings and custom orders alike. For something simple like online poster printing, it is as easy as uploading your final files, choosing your finish options, and placing your order.

However, sometimes to get the right information to the right people, you need more customization. This might include personalizing printed training manuals with tabs, slip sheets, and other updated content. Online print services make it easy to build those custom documents without increasing your project lead-time.

For example, in March 2020, a major USA fast food chain needed to deliver handwashing guides, safety information posters, and door clings to their 941 locations. By partnering with Mimeo for online print services, their locations received those essential documents within 24 hours of placing the order.

5. Reorder with Confidence 

Sometimes, you need to stay resilient in the face of positive outcomes, too. When trial direct mail campaigns go well, your company doubles their new hire count, or you sell more tickets to your class than you expected, you need the agility to reorder fast.

Online print services make reordering easy. For example, within Mimeo printing, your print files and custom documents are saved to your personal library. That way, getting another batch of your winning content is as easy as hitting “order again”.

For example, the marketing team at WEG exhibits at trade shows. When they run out of event collateral on day one of an event, they log into Mimeo on their mobile devices and order more online prints in just a few clicks. 

Try Out Online Printing

Online printing services keep you resilient so you can respond to changing circumstances – whether good or bad – without wasting documents or your budget. As pioneers of online printing since 1998, Mimeo is here to help you with everything from booklet printing to catalog printing to last-minute custom orders. 

Schedule a call to see our online printing platform in action. Not only will we keep you agile, we’ll probably end up saving you money, too!