If you run or are part of an Estate Agency business, then chances are you will have a high demand for certain print products. These will probably range from small format marketing materials like business cards or letterheads to large format items like banners for promotional purposes.
If your business is multi location, then the demand for these print products will be even higher which makes controlling the creation, ordering, processing and costs of such items more complex.
One of the ways this can be managed though is through the use of a web to print portal or storefront. What this gives you is the ability to order, customise, print and ship any printed collateral from a centralised ecommerce style website. A web to print storefront can be fully customisable to meet an Estate Agent’s particular printing requirements including branding, billing, reporting and more.
A web to print storefront can enable an Estate Agent business to:
- Create their own print materials using editable templates
- Order custom print materials or static inventory items
- Manage orders, shipments and billing
- Manage everything from one convenient place
The combined result of these benefits is a saving of valuable time and resource, the ability to control where you order your print materials from as well as keeping costs down. Let’s delve further into why an online print portal is a great investment for Estate Agents.
Understanding what the Print Storefront does
Another common name for a storefront is a print portal. A website that only you or your staff are able to log into with private details. Once logged in, the user is taken to an interface which houses all of your marketing and administration print collateral.
From this point, the portal provides access your own range of editable templates for your print materials. Instead of every department or employee handling their print needs separately, it provides a centrally managed ordering system which allows staff in different departments, or locations, to login and quickly and easily place print orders. This allows you to control your brand and print budgets more effectively.
Personalise your sales approach and customer service
There will be many occasions where an Estate Agent may be required to personalise their printed products. Rather than spending time with mail merge or manually amending correspondence, a print storefront will allow you to save all your important documents online with easy to manipulate templates that can be edited quickly to achieve the required print item.
Control Marketing Budgets
If your Estate Agency company is multi location, there will be many employees requiring printed collateral. This means it can be difficult to control budgets and stay on top of who is ordering what.
A print storefront can be set up to have many registered users. Whilst this might sound like another system that is hard to control, approval processes can built into the system to ensure a number of things:-
- An approvals process mean that orders will be pending until a manager or admin approves them
- Order limits or monthly allowances can be set on certain items
- A cost centre can be attached for specific billing requirements meaning you can allocate items to specific departments or all to one area
- Bulk buying can give you access to discounted prices. There may be a number of departments that require the same items without knowing that this is the case. This means you can create a shared inventory.
Managing your inventory
A print storefront allows you to do away with housing all your marketing collateral onsite. You can keep a track of all your inventory via the portal and even set reminders to re-order materials as and when you require by setting your own thresholds. You could even take this one step further by setting it to place an order automatically.
In addition, rather than ordering too many of one type of collateral, risking them not being used or requiring a re-design before being used, you can order and print on demand with one click. Therefore just ordering what you need, when you need it.
Maintaining version control
Instead of having to communicate with a variety of teams or individuals, providing the latest versions of marketing or communications collateral, a print portal gives you access to control all outdated versions from one place.
This can be a real boon for Estate Agency businesses. Products such as estate agent boards and property brochure printing can be controlled and latest versions maintained across the company.
In addition, there may be versions of marketing collateral you want to revisit and order at particular times of the year based on seasonal campaigns or promotional offers. These can all be stored, managed, amended and ordered from one convenient place.
Maintaining brand consistency
Getting your branding right can take time and the last thing you want is for it to be misrepresented with quickly put together marketing materials.
Using a print portal eliminates this risk. Creating templates within a print portal for a variety of print products from to property brochures to banners, an Estate Agency business can ensure that every employee and team are singing (or printing!) from the same hymn sheet.
Templates enable you to have formalised materials with the ability to change small details such as locations, images or particular services. Giving the ability to make these changes to any staff member with the control of maintaining brand consistency takes the pressure off a graphic designer or a single responsible individual.
Take control with a web to print storefront
For a medium to large Estate Agency business, it’s hard to deny the many benefits of investing in a print portal to manage your print product requirements.
If you’re interested in a web to print storefront or portal and would like a no commitment chat, contact us at Flex4. We are web to print software specialists with over 15yrs experience.