Print shops are flourishing in a new, modern age. With new technologies come new services, and printers are able to fulfil more orders than ever, but with this evolution, print shops also face new stresses.
However, new online proofing software for printers has been created to help print shops keep up with the times. Online proofing offers multiple benefits: streamlining your processes, improving turnaround time and bettering overall customer service, among other benefits.
Online Proofing
New tools such as printers and presses have dramatically increased output for print businesses as well as diversify the variety of services they offer. This is great for print businesses, but it also means that keeping all projects organized when the business is working at a much faster pace becomes difficult.
Online proofing can easily resolve all the difficulties print businesses face as they scale and increase their workload. As a printer, you’ve no doubt come across some common obstacles when proofing various assets with your customers. Lapses in communication, unclear feedback and a sluggish approval process can plague the proofing process, and as you read on, you’ll see that online proofing takes a unique approach to eliminating these issues. Online proofing will save you and your employees valuable work time and cut down on operational costs, as well.
An online proofing software for printers will alleviate these barriers and give your print shop the freedom to scale even further. Here’s how:
Better Organization
Your print shop does a lot. It’s practically a necessity that you not only offer print, but a range of marketing services – mailers, signs, banners, vehicle graphics, brochures, business cards, and the list keeps growing. You need a system for not only organizing and storing all of your proofs, but keeping track of all the communications regarding them. An online proofing software for printers is built specifically to meet these needs.
All proofs can be consolidated into one company account, no matter which employees are responsible for their proofing and approval. With a single account, it will be easy to see how your projects are moving along, which proofs are being held up and how your business is performing overall.
A customizable tagging system helps sort out your numerous projects by employee, customer, account or project. Sorting through multiple versions, feedback and decisions to determine a timeline for proofs becomes much easier on a platform organized this way.
Easier Collaboration
Over the course of a project, the proofing process can comprise many different versions of the same proof as well as companion files. If a project contains a banner design, flyers and a brochure, keeping customer feedback straight over multiple revisions can become onerous, and this hampers effective collaboration between you and your customers.
To make feedback and discussions move along a lot smoother, an online proofing software for printers includes tools to aid in easier collaboration. Threaded comments accompanying each issue on a proof ensure that you’ll never have to go hunting through emails to find the feedback you’re looking for, and comments will be easy to reply to and resolve.
With all the information so easy to locate, it gives everyone much more accountability. You can track down just when and what someone said. Having this kind of history of communication for a project will be helpful in the future, and improve your customer service.
Usable Feedback
Good feedback is the cornerstone to a successful project that moves to print on schedule and with far fewer versions. You’ve already seen how online proofing software for printers can better consolidate your communications with customers, and this definitely goes a long way to streamlining feedback and conversation. However, this type of software can aid in giving you better feedback in other ways.
Mark up tools give your approvers, who may not speak the same design language as you, the ability to more adequately explain their ideas to you. Perhaps they want the logo to be larger, but how much larger? Or maybe the logo is just in the wrong location, but where would they rather have it? Tools such as rectangles, arrows and annotations will make their feedback clearer and actionable.
Expedited Approval Process
New printers and presses allow your business to output projects much quicker and accurately, but until online proofing software, the proofing process hadn’t undergone the same evolution in technology. In order to keep up with demand, your approvals need to also run smoother and faster. By using an online proofing software, the approval process can now match your intake and output.
Automation is key for a faster approval process. Software is able to handle some of the repetitive process for you, especially regarding approval workflows and reminders. A proofing software easily manages approval workflows for you, automatically sending the proof on to the next approver in the sequence after one gives their approval. You can also add non-approvers, and these people will receive all the same notifications about the proof without needing to provide any input. This can be helpful for keeping salespeople or designers up to date on projects.
Clients want their projects printed, but sometimes you still have to hunt them down for feedback and decisions. Automated reminders save you the time of tracking your clients down. Automated reminders also remove the human element – your clients won’t feel like you’re personally nagging them, it’s just the system.
The Best Online Proofing Software for Printers is Ashore
Ashore was built to address the needs of printers. We’ve seen the landscape of the printing industry change dramatically, and we want to give your business the freedom to grow and scale with the times.
We designed our online proofing software for printers to revitalize relationships with your customers. By giving you a centralized location to discuss proofs and track approvals, your business has the means to improve your overall business system by improving one of the most important, and time-consuming, processes. Want to see how an online proofing software for printers can improve your business? Sign up for free with Ashore today.
