AAS Puts Printers Online For Productivity And Profit
2006 MAY 16 | BYMarketing Solutions Company Works Seamlessly With Printers to Offer "On-Demand" Document Creation and Fulfillment to its Clientele.
In the past, when an individual business wanted to do some local marketing and approached a printer to execute a direct mail campaign or produce point-of-sale materials, neither company came out a big winner. Printers could lose time and money on small administrative labor-intensive orders and business owners were saddled with a time-consuming process of coordinating creative and mailing list companies, getting corporate approval on individual pieces, and coordinating with a print house to fulfill the order.
Enter Web-to-Print
Since 2002, AAS, an integrated marketing solutions company, has been working with large corporations in industries such as insurance, automotive, high-tech, consumer goods and wireless/communications, to provide Web solutions to improve marketing efforts at the local level. AAS has been designing Web portals where dealers at the local level go to customize direct mail pieces, point-of-sale and other campaign materials, and have them printed and mailed or shipped with a few clicks without ever leaving their desktops. With "demand generation" or virtual Web-to-print services, local business owners can customize corporate-approved design templates, create targeted mailing lists from live databases linked to real-time consumer, business and automotive records, and fulfill orders with a printer in minutes. This means the speed-to-market time, from print to delivery to customers, is reduced to as little as 3-5 days.
With business rules and delivery preferences determined from a pre-established relationship with AAS, printers are sure to have orders, mailing lists and creative elements transferred to them by Internet and provided in consistent file formats through an efficient pre-approved system. Printing partners are given access to a secure FTP site provided by AAS to access high-resolution ready-to-print EPS, PDF, TIFF or GIF files and print orders and mailing lists are formatted and delivered to printers in a manner to achieve greater speed-to-market for local dealers.
Dramatic Increase in Use of Promotional Materials
As a result, the order and the fulfillment process saves printers' time, money and aggravation and the dealers' large parent corporations see a dramatic increase in the use of promotional materials at the local level around the country. From 2002 through the end of 2005, some clients saw nearly a five times increase in promotional pieces created and distributed and that meant big, streamlined orders for printers. The average volume of an order was 1,500 pieces or 80 to 1,000 orders per day. In the last two years, business owners have executed more than 24,000 orders for a combined total of more than 33 million print pieces.
Specific success stories include AAS' partnership with a title Insurance company, which produced more than 3,800 orders and five million collateral pieces in 2004 alone. Also that year, Daimler Chrysler produced nearly 3,000 orders for a total of more than 6.3 million pieces, 90 percent of which were produced in four-color digital print.
Founded in 1978, AAS provides measurable, end-to-end marketing solutions helping clients ensure that their branding, messages and promotional offers are customized at the local level to reach the right people with the right message to drive sales. The company leads the industry in trade promotions marketing and co-op management, digital asset management, Web-based ad/promotion customization and turnkey media fulfillment and helps a variety of global and Fortune 500 companies Market smarter, Market faster and Market more.