4 Reasons to Consider Raised Foil

A few weeks ago we told you about what spot gloss print can do, and now we want to introduce you to raised foil! Raised foil is a versatile addition to your customers’ print pieces that is sure to attract attention. Here are four reasons they should consider adding raised foil to their next business card, announcement, or postcard order.

1. More Color for More Creativity
We debuted raised foil with nine different colors to choose from because we understand that more options allow you to connect with more customers. With classic gold and silver metallic—shiny or dull—and a variety of other colors including eye-catching silver holographic foil, your customer has the variety of foil colors they need to create just the look they’re looking for.

And speaking of color…

2. Bring the Shine of Foil to Full Color
Does your customer love the versatility of full color but want the elegance of foil? Do they want to bring their favorite foil style to new heights? Do they want to give their full color brand style an upgrade? Raised foil is a great way to do just that. Because raised foil is paired with full color print, your customer has a broad palette of color to play with in both foil and ink. They can add foil accents to full color images, add foil text to vibrant photographs, and much more.

3. Foil with Fine Detail
Not only does raised foil give your customer a variety of options for color, it also gives them a variety of options for design. Whether they are looking for bold foil designs or fine detail, raised foil delivers. If you want to know more about the best ways to design for raised foil, take a look at this design guide for more information.

4. You Can Be Sure of Your Design
We understand that these new print processes can be daunting—that’s why we offer the opportunity for you to order a single business card, announcement, or postcard. This allows you to check a printed proof of the design for a small fee before committing to your order, and it allows you to adjust the design as needed for a small additional fee for each proof.

Want to promote this print process to your customers? We’ve created this flyer to help you show off what raised foil print can do. And, when you’re ready to order, you can order either through our catalog or on Navitor.com.

What do you like best about raised foil? We’d love to see you join the conversation in the comments below.

Get Back to Basics With These Marketing Tips

back to basics personalized print marketing ideasSummer can be a tough time for marketing. You’re busy and your customers are busy, and that can make it a challenge to create an effective marketing strategy. However, those challenges also make it a great time to get back to basics with your marketing! Here are four tips that will help you bring your marketing back to basics.

1. Focus on Who You’re Talking To
This is the heart of any good marketing strategy, and focusing on the audience you’re reaching out to is the best shortcut to market effectively even when time is tight. Think about whether you’re reaching out to existing customers or new customers, and then use what you know about those customers to create a strategy. What media do they engage with? Can you send an email, or do you need to reach out using ads in local media or a direct mail piece? Focus your efforts where they’ll be most effective, and let your audience be your guide.

2. What Is Everyone Else Doing? Consider Doing the Opposite
One of the best ways to stand out is to do what nobody else is doing. If your competition is advertising through email, for example, a simple handwritten note could be the best way to make your business memorable.

3. Think About What Worked in the Past but Isn’t Used Now—And Think About Why
Sometimes, marketing strategies are dropped for good reason. You might have stopped putting your energy into newspaper advertising, for example, because you got better results from focusing your efforts on creating a quality email campaign. However, if you dropped a marketing strategy for other reasons—you didn’t previously have the time to pursue it, for example, or something new took your attention instead—it might be worthwhile to revisit that strategy. As an added bonus, you might be able to get inspired for new marketing efforts by examples in your files from these old projects.

4. Always Be Willing to Learn New Things
With new technologies arriving every day, the marketing landscape—especially for smaller businesses—is constantly changing. While there are a lot of tips that can help you navigate that changing world, nothing will serve you better than a willingness to learn. Staying open to new information will help keep you from getting stuck in a rut when it comes to your marketing strategy, and it will keep you flexible enough to adapt to new options when they arrive.

What marketing tips can’t you live without? We’d love to see your tips and tricks in the comments below.

Privately Labeled Food and Beverage Items

In the 1980s, grocery shoppers had two big choices to make while filling their carts. Would they choose tried and true name brand items that were sold in highly attractive packaging and familiar to consumers by their television, radio, and print ads? Or would they choose generic “off brands,” as they were often called, which were sold in plain white packaging with simple black lettering? The two choices pitted a consumer’s aesthetic inclinations against their budgetary sensibilities. Oh, what a dilemma!

Generic products simply listed the item’s name  (“Cola”), the ingredients, nutritional information, and UPC bar code. They were devoid of logos, photos and illustrations, and any sort of descriptive words that might entice shoppers. They also lacked expensive celebrity endorsements and pricey promotions. The idea was the marketing savings could be passed on to the consumer in the form of a less expensive product. Yes, they might not have the catchy advertising jingles, slogans, and colorful packaging that the name brands took great pains to perfect, but for budget-conscious ‘80s shoppers, it became an acceptable trade-off.

But how did the products taste and perform? Many believed generics were name brand factory seconds that lacked taste and nutritional value. Ironically, generics were often processed at the very same plants where their name brand counterparts were created. Blindfold taste tests regularly resulted in people not being able to tell the difference between the two. So why bother with the fancy labels? And just who was choosing to spend more on products sold with name brand packaging when the same was offered for less in stark white and black boxes and bottles? Did elves or talking toucans make a product taste better, after all? Was a product more trustworthy if a famous baseball player was peddling it?

By 1984, retail chains realized that the savings of printing labels was minimal. That realization paired well with another thought. Perhaps the name brand loyalists were convinced the pretty packaging ensured a superior product? A new idea began to brew. What if these retailers packaged products produced by name brand manufacturers with their own house/store brand names? What if they ditched the simple black and white and created packaging every bit as fancy as the name brands? They could still sell these products at a lesser cost than name brands by foregoing the marketing and advertising expenses.

A new era was born. Since those early days, privately labeled goods have blossomed into a respectable alternative to name brands, and are often sold in attractive packaging that rivals their famous name brand counterparts they share shelf space with. Just as pretty, but less expensive. Consumers can’t get enough!

Today, privately labeled items are sold in a wide spectrum of products, and in a large variety of settings. Grocery store chains sell just about every kind of boxed, canned, bottled, or bagged item bearing their very own private label brand. Restaurants, delis, coffee shops, boutiques, and many other retailers sell privately labeled products. Shampoo, salad dressings, cereal, canned vegetables, cooking oil, crackers, coffee syrups, chicken wing sauce… the list goes on and on!

The market for private labels continues to grow. In 2014, a Consumers Reports study showed that 93 percent of American women surveyed choose store brands on a regular basis to save money. That same year, private label sales grew 2.5%, while national brands grew only 1.1%. Consumers report they see virtually no difference between the private labels they’re buying and the national brands they’ve given up.

So what does this all mean for label manufacturers? A great deal, actually! Many privately labeled products are produced in smaller batches. Think of a family-run restaurant selling bottles of barbecue sauce, the local steak house with various spices and marinades for sale, or an eye clinic selling bottles of lens cleaner bearing their name. All of these products require labels or packaging. Consumers rely on these labels to inform them of the contents of the bottle, box, or container. What is contained inside? What is the weight or volume of the product inside the package?

In addition to informing consumers about the contents, privately labeled food and beverage labels also carry the oh-so-important Nutrition Facts information as well as ingredient lists. For many, what’s on the back of the label is just as important as what’s on the front! An ever-increasing consciousness about nutritional intake has Americans far and wide “checking the label” and shopping according to what’s listed.

At Label Works, we take great pride in offering enhancements which will help win shoppers and browsers by allowing for truly unique food and beverage labels.

Some of our available options include:

  • Barcodes
  • Variable Content: Batch Multiple Versions
  • Clear Film for a ‘no label’ look
  • Foil and embossing to create elegance
  • Stocks for refrigerated, frozen or submersible items
  • Custom shapes unique to your brand
  • Ability to be machine applied

Quite the upgrade from the days of stark white and black packaging, right? We offer sample packs and sales flyers that can be personalized with your distributor’s logo and contact information to help your customers better visualize how snappy their product labels can be!

Throughout the month of May, to highlight our private label possibilities, we’re having a special promotion! We’ll be giving away some privately labeled BBQ products, so get your grills ready! Click here to enter.

We’re here to answer any of your questions! Please contact Label Works at 800-522-3558 to request private label food and beverage label sample packs or click here to download & personalize sales flyers.

New on Navitor.com: Multi-Design Ordering

What’s new from Navitor? Multi-design ordering! You’ve asked us for a more flexible ordering system, and we’re happy to deliver it to you. The Multiple Design feature allows you to upload multiple artwork files at once so that you can order all of your designs on one screen.

Big Benefits
One of the biggest benefits of multi-design ordering is that it allows you to streamline the process of ordering for a customer that needs multiple designs of the same product. This is especially helpful when you’re working with a customer who has a large number of employees that work directly with customers and might need their own business cards. Multi-design ordering will allow you to simply upload all the business cards your customer will need for their financial, insurance, hospitality, or property management business.

By uploading multiple designs at once, you’ll also save time when ordering. Because you can view all your designs on a single screen, you can easily check to ensure that fronts and backs for business cards are paired correctly for all the cards in your order, for example. This will give you back some time in your day, letting you work on other important tasks.

Get Started
Ready to place an order for multiple designs? In the Online Price Calculator, products with multi design ordering as an option will feature a check box to confirm those additional designs; you’ll see this option for business cards, signs, badges, and trading cards. Once you’ve clicked it, a new option for adding additional designs will appear, and you can put in the number of additional designs you would like to order and click “Start Your Order.” You can order up to 30 designs at once by using this process.

Once you’ve told us how many designs you want to order, click “Upload Artwork” and upload your files. Once the designs are uploaded, you can add the artwork to the blank canvases in the studio and approve your artwork.

Are you more of a visual learner? Download this quick guide to walk you through the process.

What do you love most about multi-design ordering? We’d love to see you join in the conversation in the comments below.

3 Tips to Supercharge Your Summer Marketing

A few months back we talked through our top tips for giving a boost to your marketing in spring. As weather continues to get warmer, it’s time to turn our attention to summer—and to summer marketing! While it can be easy to lose sight of what’s important during the busy summer months, with a few simple tips you can supercharge your marketing during the summer season.

1. Pick a Theme
Summer can be a busy time for both you and your customers, and having a theme to pull you throughout the summer can help give a boost to your brand recognition. Whether it’s a a marketing message repeated through the summer or focusing on a few favorite products, having a theme for your marketing helps ensure that busy customers are exposed to that theme. It also helps make your work easier—when you’ve got one good idea, you can run with it for the season!

2. Make It Visually Appealing
When you think of summer, you probably think of vibrant colors. To keep up with that trend, it’s a good idea for you to focus on keeping your marketing efforts visually interesting. Use eyecatching colors or readable designs to show off your favorite products in emails, flyers, or marketing pieces. Use samples to create a display on a tabletop or in a window. Bring print pieces with visual appeal to your sales meetings.

3. Don’t Be Afraid to Take a Shortcut
Now, we don’t mean that you should skimp on marketing this summer—even though it’s busy, you want your business to keep moving in the warm weather—but it’s important that you know where you can take something off your plate. The most important of these “shortcuts” could be something we’ve talked about quite a few times: the sales tools your suppliers offer. For example, if your suppliers offer unbranded sales flyers, consider using those flyers as the backbone of an awareness campaign.

Why are these “shortcuts” so important? First and foremost, because these sales tools are ready for you to use and they help you save time during a busy time of the year. They also allow you to focus on how best to speak to your customers. Do they prefer physical marketing pieces? Print the flyer to give them at your next sales meeting. Do they want to peruse marketing pieces on their own time? Attach a flyer—or link them to a personalized e-catalog—along with your next email. Do they respond best to seeing print pieces in person? Pull out your samples and use the flyers as a reminder of the pieces they looked at during your meeting.

How do you keep your marketing strategy moving during the busy summer months? We’d love to see your tips and tricks in the comments below.

Boost Summer Sales for Small Business

Are you looking for a way to boost your sales this summer? We’ve got news for you! The latest of our vertical market sales kits is here, giving you a chance to speak directly to the print needs of small businesses. Here’s what you need to know about this new kit.

small business kit brochure, business cards, announcements, letterhead, forms, postcards, announcements

What’s In It?
We’ve created this kit around a lawn care business, and all of the products are hand-picked for that market. Practical pieces like business cards, forms, and letterhead are just the start. “Thank you” notes can help build rapport with customers at the end of the season, brochures are a great way to inform prospective customers of new services, and other pieces like Post-it® Notes and door hangers make great leave-behinds if your customer is going door-to-door to drum up business.

These products might be tailored for lawn care, but they’re a great fit for a wide variety of small businesses looking to give a boost to their marketing strategy. Use the kit as an example of how your customer could create a complete print suite no matter what market they’re working in.

How Can You Use It?
Ready to put this sales kit to work? Be sure to bring it with you when you meet with potential customers, especially if you work often with small businesses. It’s also important to keep the samples within reach for when customers walk into your storefront, because you never know when a small business owner will reach out to you.

These kits can be used for much more than samples, though. They are also a great way to highlight cross-selling opportunities. Did your customer come to you for letterhead and business cards to stock up for the summer season, for example? This kit will show them how they could create other print pieces to give their small business an additional boost.

Ready for the Summer Slump
With so many people heading out on vacation, summer can be a slow season. That’s why we are debuting this kit now. A new sales tool for reaching out to a new market could help you connect with new customers even during a slow season.

Best of all, this new sales kit is available free of charge. Simply contact your customer care team to request yours or visit our website to request a kit online.

What do you think of this new sales kit? We’d love to see you join the conversation in the comments below.

Quiz: Do You Know the History of Promotional Products

Summer is coming soon, and that means it’s time for your customers to purchase promotional products for their summer events. You might not realize this, but the promotional products industry has a long history. Do you know that history? Take this quiz to find out.

1. The history of promotional products goes a long way back, and got its start in the earliest US elections. What year’s election saw the first commemorative button?
A) 1789
B) 1792
C) 1796
D) 1800

2. That wasn’t the end of campaign buttons. Who was the first presidential candidate to have the image of their face featured on a button?
A) Andrew Jackson
B) Abraham Lincoln
C) Teddy Roosevelt
D) Ulysses S. Grant

3. Promotional products have been around for a long time, but one businessman is most often credited as the first to produce them commercially in the late 1800s. What was his name?
A) Isaac Young
B) Abraham Brown
C) Jasper Meek
D) Everett Hill

4. If you work in the promotional products industry, you know that there are a variety of different trade associations. Which organization got that started?
A) Advertising Specialties Institute (ASI.
B) Promotional Products Association International (PPAI.
C) Upper Midwest Association of Promotional Professionals (UMAPP.

5. Sometimes promotional products are popular enough to become products on their own. Which of these products got their start as a promotional offer?
A) Hall’s cough drops
B) McDonalds hamburgers
C) Singer sewing needles
D) Wrigley’s chewing gum

ANSWERS:
1) A. The first promotional item in US history was a commemorative button made for the George Washington in the election of 1789.
2) B. Abraham Lincoln was the first presidential candidate to have his face featured on a campaign button.
3) C. In the late 1800s, Jasper Meek wanted to keep his newspaper presses running during slow times. He then started printing burlap bags with advertising messages. A local shoe store then gave them to school children to promote his business.
4) B. PPAI got its start as the Advertising Manufacturers Association in 1904. ASI got its start in 1950.
5) D. Believe it or not, Wrigley’s sold baking powder before their promotional gum became a smash hit. Their baking powder was also a promotional product that was a hit; they originally sold soap.

The promotional products industry has come a long way since the commemorative buttons in the 1789 election. With nationwide trade organizations, tradeshows, and publications, it is now a booming business, and we’re happy to be a part of it!

What’s the most memorable promotional product you have ever received? How did you do on the quiz? We’d love to see you join in the conversation in the comments below.

Have a More Effective Team Meeting in 4 Steps

Whether you’re hosting a staff meeting or are kicking off a new project with the team working on it, a team meeting can be a great use of your time. However, if your meetings aren’t achieving what you want, it’s time to rethink how you run your team meetings. Here are four simple steps that will help you get more out of your meetings.

1. Start with A Goal
Every meeting has to have a purpose, whether you’re starting up a project or just keeping everyone updated on the projects that your department is working on, and keeping that goal in mind is essential. Staying focused on your goal will help ensure that you get the most out of your meeting. If you don’t have a goal, though, the time you would otherwise have used for a meeting might be better spent on other tasks.

2. Make Sure Everyone Has Been Introduced
The best start to your meeting is ensuring that everyone in the team has been introduced. This is especially important if you’re bringing together a team of employees who don’t work together often or if a new employee is joining you. Introducing everyone isn’t just a get-to-know-you, though—it ensures that everyone knows who to call when they need to follow up on important information.

3. Assign Roles
While a meeting works best when everyone participates, consider assigning roles to keep everything moving smoothly. One person should be leading the conversation, for example, to ensure that you stick to the topics that need to be covered. This also ensures that there’s one person who can wrangle distracted meeting attendees if you start having multiple conversations.

Leading the meeting isn’t the only job, though. If someone isn’t able to make it to the meeting, make sure someone is taking notes for them. If you’ve got a lot to cover, have one person keep track of time and remind everyone when the end time has almost arrived.

4. End When You’ve Said You’ll End
Your day is busy, and so are the days of your meeting attendees! That’s why it’s so important to do your best to end meetings when you’ve said you’ll end them. It’s possible that your meetings might run long, but if you’re constantly running over end times you’re probably trying to cram too much into your meetings.

How do you make the most of your team meetings? Do you have any tips you’d like to share? We’d love to see you join the conversation in the comments below.

Your How-To Guide for Enhanced Finishes

You’ve heard about Navitor’s new enhanced finishes products—are you ready to design them? Today we’re taking you through how to create enhanced finishes files, step by step.

1. Know Your Resources!
We know it can be daunting to create the designs for our enhanced finishes products at first—that’s why we have created a few resources that could help you navigate the design process more effectively. If you want to spend some time getting to know the process, we recommend visiting our website for downloadable file creation tutorials.

You can also use these documents with your customers when they are creating their own designs. The unbranded documents feature all of the file requirements for each print process, making them an excellent option for customers who want to get hands on with the design process themselves.

Are you more of a visual learner? We’ve got you covered there, too—watch this video created by one of our graphic designers to see the process step by step!

2. Download Your Enhanced Finishes Swatch Library
Ready to get started? Start by downloading the swatch library from the Enhanced Finishes page on Navitor.com.

3. Open Your Full Color Design and the Enhanced Finishes Swatch Library
A full color design is the foundation of your enhanced finishes design, so start with that full color design. Then, once the base design is ready to go, open up the swatch library you downloaded in step two.

how to design enhanced finishes spot uv gloss, raised gold silver foil, raised spot ultraviolet gloss

4. Create a New Layer For Enhanced Finishes
Whatever design elements you want to bring spot gloss, raised spot gloss, or raised foil to, create a new layer and place them there. Next use one of the various enhanced finish swatches to color the elements then from attributes set them to “Overprint Fill” so they receive the enhanced finish.

5. Create Your Press File
Your design is ready to go! Double-check to ensure that your file will be created using CMYK color and export the file!

6. Still Not Sure? Order One.
We know that you might want a bit of extra practice before you are ready to place your full order, which is why we offer you the option to order a single print piece. This press proof gives you the chance to review your design for a small fee and adjust as needed.

What do you love most about our new enhanced finishes business cards, announcements, and postcards? We’d love to see you join the conversation in the comments below.

3 Tips For Next Year’s Tax Season

Take a deep breath. Tax season is over and you can take a moment to relax. Breathe a sigh of relief. Have a cup of coffee.

And now that you’ve had your moment, it’s time to start preparing for next year.

As much as you are probably glad that tax season is over for the year, it’s a great idea for you to start thinking about how to make next year’s tax season come together with ease. Here are our 3 tips for things that you can do now to make the next tax season go smoothly.

1. Start Preparing Now
Remember that bit of panic that started when you started your taxes for the year? Get ahead of that stress by starting early. Keep your paperwork organized in a way that will make it easy to use when tax season comes around. Update your spreadsheets periodically. And, when tax season comes up, get your paperwork done with plenty of time to spare. Not only will preparing early allow you to get your taxes done quicker, but it will also give you extra time to handle unexpected questions that might come up.

And speaking of that preparation…

2. What Stressed You Out This Year? Take Note of it For Next Year
This is probably the simplest way to make next spring go more smoothly for your tax preparation process: if anything caused you additional stress this year, that’s the first thing you should try to improve for next year. Did you have to track down a number of digital invoices last minute, for example? Consider printing those invoices to file with physical documents or keep them on file in a designated folder. If you can create better habits throughout the year, you can decrease your stress for all future tax seasons.

3. Stay Up-To-Date on Tax Law Changes
Tax law is always changing, and it’s much easier to read up on the legal changes once every month than it is to try to catch up come 2020. Do your best to stay up do date on any changes to tax law that might be relevant to your business and you won’t be blindsided come tax season.

Do you have tips for other things that business owners can do to get ahead of next year’s tax season? We’d love to see you join the conversation in the comments below.