BPI by Design

As I trekked across the state of Georgia toward Alabama, my wheels (in my brain and on my vehicle) were turning quickly. Recent client meetings seemed to circle back to the design phase of the printing process. With budgets and personnel being cut, having a designer on staff seems more like a luxury than a necessity. This trend in marketing departments has led many clients to pose the question to BPI Media Group, "Can you guys do design for my company?" With additional staff being added to BPI, I can answer confidently, "Yes, we can absolutely help with your design projects."

Part of our growth over the past few years has been to assist you, our clients, with as many aspects of the print solution as possible. Some of our clients do have designers on staff or have long-term, existing relationships with freelance designers. For those folks, we definitely will not step on anyone's toes, but for those needing design services, we would be happy to help. We have a team of designers, each with exceptional talents, who can help from a simple typesetting or layout project (such as a form) to a collateral brochure or catalog. We can also create or update logos to help with your branding if needed. Click here for a simple case study from a pleased client for whom we did the print and design. I can gladly share a portfolio of our design capabilities to give you an overview of our work.

I thought this summed it up nicely!

Here I'll share a few links, ideas and resources for designers and those in need of design assistance. Not sure if you need help with design or considering tackling it yourself? Here's a great article about when to reach out to a design professional. The list of top 10 resources are a must read!

Whether you're a new marketer or simply don't have the time or staff to tackle it in house, BPI's design team can help and here's why:

• Our toolbox is full of expertise and experience.
• We know how to design for print (thus eliminating the back and forth of missing fonts, links, low-res images and other common file issues such as insufficient bleed).
• Multiple concepts are provided, so you can find the style that's right for you and your brand.
• Revisions and edits are made upon your suggestions quickly and follow your guidance (after all, it's YOUR brand and YOUR print project.)
• Online proofing through our Kodak Insite proofing system is available where you can "comment" virtually to communicate with our designers. (Click here for more about this fantastic proofing option.)
• Final files of the completed design are available to you in various formats (native files, usually Adobe InDesign, pdf, jpg, etc) to use/share/post.
• Need help with your web design too? With BPI's new on-staff webmaster, we can help with this too. Check out our website review offer.

For the designers out there (of whom I'm immensely jealous because I lack the creative/artistic gene), keep in mind that designing for digital printing is a little different than designing for offset printing. Click here for some tips on successful designing for digital printing.

• If you don't already subscribe to this magazine, it's a good one: Graphic Arts Monthly. Our prepress and design staff find this one full of great info!
• Another cool publication is CMYK Magazine. This one is quite inspiring!
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• Lastly, check out BPI's latest edition of Graphic Advisors (should be in your mailbox this week!). It has a great article about Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 and what's in it for you as a designer.

Please leave a comment if you have a question or would like additional information. If you'd like to subscribe to BPI's Graphic Advisor (a quarterly publication), click here. As always, thanks for reading, following, sharing, commenting and until next time...Elizabeth

Coming to a City Near You!!! We Deliver.

You all know that I am here, there and everywhere in the Southeast these days, so you're not surprised when you call and hear me say "I'm on the road today." Being on the road is part of my job, and I don't mind it one bit (although the place who cleans up my vehicle probably does mind becuase of the insane amount of french fries under my seat!).

(That's really not my car, but it very well could be!)

In travelling, even after several years, I still get excited to see our very own delivery truck on the road and wave frantically at our drivers. To keep with our updated brand of BPI Media Group (formerly Boaz Printing), we had our delivery truck wrapped with our new logo. Look for this delivery truck in your area, or better yet, on your dock unloading your printed pieces. Our delivery guys don't get enough credit for the long hours, many miles and hard work they put in, so here's a huge THANK YOU to them for all they do for BPI.

In terms of delivery, I've put together a few ideas on how BPI can help you deliver your message.

• 1. Mail: We can help get your catalog or direct mailer into the mailboxes of your customers/prospects. By partnering with BPI to handle your mailings, you can take advantage of discounted postage rates because of barcoding through automation. (What does that mean? It means we run your mail list through software that sorts it by zip code, applies a barcode and addresses them in that manner to make it quick & easy for the postal system which results in a lower postage rate for you.) We can also do list purchases, data cleansing and data management.
• 2. Fulfillment: Our distribution department can handle a wide variety of pick and pack orders (in all shapes & sizes) to ship to your customers or prospects. We ship everything from printed material to beanie babies to caps & t-shirts. Our warehouse can hold these materials and save you a bundle in storage costs as well as on shipping and distribution.
• 3. Email: BPI's email campaign solution offers a way to pair your printed message with an email message. By complementing print with online messaging via email, you'll boost your response rates and ROI.
• 4. Web: One of the biggest ways you can deliver your message to your target audience is through your website. Are you using your website as your vehicle of choice (i.e., a Cadillac) to reach customers and prospects? Or, is your website a pinto that you don't promote because it needs that face lift you've been putting off a little too long? Don't fret! BPI is offering a website review for $175. This review & analysis is done by our resident web guru, and then we'll sugest improvements (if necessary) and provide a quote. If you want to upgrade your pinto to the Cadillac of websites, we'd love to help you make your website the most useful method of delivery for you.
• 5. Socially: Tweeting and sharing relevant info via facebook or LinkedIn are excellent ways to drive your message to the masses. Word of advice: make it timely, short and sweet! With social messages changing every 5 seconds, your message has got to get noticed to deliver the punch you desire. Don't have a social media whiz on your staff? No problem. We can help put a plan together to help you get started and cruise through the madness of the social media craze.

Regardless if your budget is more like a Prius than a Lexus, we can help you deliver the message in an efficient way. Let BPI help you plan for ways to reach your customers and prospects. I'd love to chat with you about ways BPI's solutions can be used to drive the sales through the roof!

Until next time...Elizabeth

Proof, Review & Approve!

For those of you who've read my blog before, you've heard me rave about Kodak Insite. Today, I'd like to tell you a little more about this proofing system and how it can be so helpful, time saving and a cost effective way to proof. Keep reading because you'll be able to sign up for our webinar about Insite at the bottom of this post. Don't miss it! Click here to watch a short video about Insite.

Just last week, one of BPI Media Group's customers in the midwest used this proofing system for the first time. This customer needed to upload a 12 GB file (that's a BIG file), and our standard ftp site didn't have space for this file. This opened the door for me to talk with them about Insite. By uploading their files to Insite, they were able to load the large file (for their 200+ page full-color catalog) in a short time and start proofing it virtually within the hour. Upon reviewing the proof internally among a couple of key staff members, they caught three pages with errors on them that they had not previously noticed. In just a few minutes, they reviewed the proof, replaced the pages with changes and approved the proof online. This particular customer then needed a hard-copy proof, so with the press of a button or two, the online proof was sent to the proof machine to output a hard-copy proof. By taking advantage of Insite's Smart Review, the customer saved the additional cost of a new proof had they not caught these small mistakes until the hard-copy proof. For a budget-conscious company, this was a huge advantage.

Here's a list of some more key features of Insite that help make this an efficient way to proof, not only for our customers, but also for our prepress technicians:

• 24/7 soft proofing in page-turn software
• Preflights files for missing fonts, inadequate bleed, RGB photos, etc and reports back to client
• Rules-based automation for less production time
• PDF workflow
• Personal password login
• History view feature
• Email notification of proof availability, approval, comments, etc.

Just a couple more examples of how using Insite for proofing has saved time and/or money for BPI's customers:

We print a football program with a custom cover and 8 custom interior pages for each home game during the college's football season. The designer uploads files in the wee hours of the morning on Monday, and by the time the office opens at 8 am, the files have already been approved. The designer is able to upload, proof and approve the custom pages at his convenience. Once prepress gets to the office, they send the job to plate, then it's off to press!

For a magazine we print quarterly, the end-customer as well as the designer need to review the proof for content/graphic layout. They use Insite to make notes or comments to one another to check things in this final stage before printing. These notes appear for our prepress techs to see as well, so we can check to make sure all the corrections noted were made.

BPI Media Group will be conducting a free webinar on our Insite product for prepress automation. If you would like to learn more about this product and how it can decrease production time and save money in the proofing stage of projects, click here, and we'll send you an invite to the FREE webinar. The webinar will be next Tuesday, October 18th @ 10 am CST/11 am EST.

We'd love for you to join this webinar and see how this proofing system can help you! Until next time...Elizabeth

1:1 and Other Ways to be Green

Kermit the frog said it best when he said, "It's not easy being green." However, with more options now, being environmentally responsible doesn't have to be difficult. In fact, with BPI Media Group, we make it pretty easy.

Today, I'll share a few ways you can take comfort in knowing that printing isn't as bad as you think for the environment. It's all about partnering with folks like BPI Media Group who care and are willing to do what it takes to make a difference.

"What's your company's environmental policy?" Sure, I hear this from time to time from marketing executives. Sure, every printer more or less has a policy like this in place, so I'm not going to tell you that ours is better, but I will tell you some ways we offer solutions that can make your efforts to protect and conserve go further, and save some green at the same time.

Top 3 ways BPI Media Group can help you go green and save green:

1. Database cleansing. When's the last time you really took a look at your data and purged it, updated it or deduped it? Even if you mail to your entire list, you can save paper, print and postage costs simply by checking for undeliverable addresses or deduping. In a lot of cases, there's no need to send the same direct mail piece or catalog to more than one person at the same address. Deduping by address is a great way to eliminate this extra cost. Many lists we see have incomplete addresses or misspelled names. BPI's mail department has some really great systems in place to help with these common issues. We run all lists through what's called NCOA (national change of address), which automatically updates an address for anyone who has moved and left a forwarding address. We also cass-certify all mailing lists to verify addresses. This same process will dedupe by name, address or exact match. All of these are great resources that are FREE when we handle your mailing.

2. Targeted personalization. By pairing down your main catalog or book to only include what is appealing to an individual or a targeted group can help your ROI and efficiency tremendously. Not only are you saving on print costs, but you're also sending a focused message to that customer or prospect of relevant material. Here's a great example of this: a small college prints a full catalog listing all majors, courses, extra curriculars, etc. This 200+ page catalog can be awfully pricey, and consume a lot of raw materials, to print and mail to all students. Instead, this college reduces their consumption of paper, ink, chemicals, etc by approx 75% simply by narrowing down the material that is relative to that particular student or group of students. This is essentially called versioning, and we'll cover this indepth in a future blog. BPI's digital print department can effectively handle this type of project when you wan to print various versions of the same piece. The info you need to narrow down a catalog like this can be gleaned from your database, online surveys, sales team, etc. Use this info to reduce waste and be more effective in your communications pieces. There's a trickle-down effect here too: elimination of energy used to produce excess/unread pages, gas and/or postage to distribute them, and not to mention all the raw materials saved during the production process.

3. 1:1 Mailing. Along the same lines as #2, you can get even more focused on your list by personalizing your direct mail pieces. Printing a 1:1 message engages your customer or prospect in ways that weren't possible a few years ago or cost effective for that matter. With the addition of our Kodak Nexpress and prinergy workflow, BPI can handle variable data printing (VDP) in a multitude of ways from graphics to messaging. These personalized mail campaigns tend to be to a tighter group of recipients, thus having a direct decrease in your print and mailing costs. More green saved!

Here are some of the technologies that BPI has in place to help make us all better stewards of our environment:

-Kodak Insite Proofing System: Offers soft proofing instead of hard-copy proofs. (We know there are times when color is critical and a hard-copy proof is needed, but for the times that you can soft proof, this is a great alternative!) You can also use this for your internal proofing without having to print out multiple copies of proofs every time changes are made.

-Storefront Solution: Set up this online ordering site where your internal staff, sales team, etc. can order collateral and stationery on an as-needed basis rather than printing and storing tons of materials that will become obsolete a few months from now anyway. This is a huge time/energy-saver for your team as well as a way to reduce print and storage costs. You'll also be saving paper and other raw materials as well.

-Database Analysis: We can help in cleansing your database, so you can do more targeted mailings, save on print and postage costs. Our mail department has been trained on ways to help mail more efficiently. We can even suggest some parameters at the design phase of your project that could help. (Size, shape, paper really does matter.)

Here are steps BPI takes to make sure we are preserving the environment:

• Recycling all plates, ink, wooden pallets and paper
• Using vegetable-based inks
• Using a soft proofing system
• Cleaning mail lists to reduce bad addresses (wasted print and mail costs)
• Providing options for recycled-content paper
• Using papers (both digital and conventional) that is 100% biodegradable
• Using a digital press with consumables that are 100% biodegradable
• Using only paper that comes from sustainable forests.

Interesting stats about print vs digital media:

• It takes 500 kilowatt hrs of electricity to produce 440 lbs of paper (average amount we each consume annually). This equates to powering one computer continuously for 5 months.

• 20% less CO2 is used/yr by a person reading a daily newspaper (print!) vs that person reading web-based news for 30 min/day.

• Print is a renewable resource, on average 5 million trees are planted ea day in the U.S.

• According to the EPA, paper is recycled at a much higher rate than any other materials at 57%, with glass at 24%, plastics at 7%, electronics at 18%.

-Source: DOWN TO EARTH, A Practical Look at Environmental Issues and Trends, The Print Council

So, printing isn't the environment's worst enemy after all and paper isn't the only way you can save money on your print budget. I'd love to talk with you and explore ways our environmental measures can mesh with yours to help us preserve this beautiful planet we call home. Here's a great resource for learning "Why Print is Green."

Until next week...Elizabeth