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Tis the Season: How to Optimize Your Shop for Efficiency and Growth

For print shops and custom-branded merchandise businesses to succeed, it takes more than offering quality products and services.

It’s about efficiency, customer experience, and continuous improvement. Whether you are managing a screen printing company, embroidery business, sign shop, or any other personalized product business, improving these areas can help you boost your sales, retain happier long-term customers, and improve your shop’s productivity. 

If you want to know how to optimize your shop and improve your overall business, take a look at our evaluation checklist below to ensure you’re set for with tools designed specifically for your needs.

1. Simplify Invoicing and Quoting 

A slow or confusing quoting process can be a major roadblock for customers, especially those unfamiliar with your business.

By simplifying customer quotes, you can speed up the sales process and increase your chances of winning business. 

This is where an online platform like Printavo can help. It lets your team quickly generate quotes, send them to customers for approval, and streamline invoicing.

Plus, digital quoting simplifies organization and communication, reducing headaches for all parties. If you’re quoting a job that needs signatures from multiple parties, like a school administrator and team coach, they can easily access and review a quote. For you and your team, you’ve got a much cleaner set of records to refer to if there are any questions about an existing order or if you need to set up a reorder. Not only does this improve the customer experience, but it also reduces the time your team spends on manual quoting and follow-ups.

2. Optimize Artwork Management and Approval

Artwork is usually the starting point for all print jobs since that’s what dictates the customization, product type, and order quantity. If your art approval process isn’t organized and requires multiple follow-ups, it can lead to delays, miscommunication, and errors. Slowdowns on the customer end can cause frustration, and slowdowns on the production side can make it harder for your team to schedule print times and keep up with order volume. 

If you don’t already have tools for managing art approvals, GraphicsFlow offers a collaborative system. Your customers can review, approve, or request changes in real time, and all communication between you and the customer is centralized, so everyone knows what’s been approved and what’s still awaiting sign-off. 

Another roadblock with art approvals is usually customer-supplied imagery since they won’t always have hi-res imagery optimized for printing. GraphicsFlow features a giant library of production-ready designs you can use to eliminate the back-and-forth between you and your customers. They can send you design ideas built from those design elements, and you can also create professional, print-ready design ideas to have them review for approval instead of creating artwork from scratch or rebuilding low-res artwork.

Incorporating an artwork management system into your operations ensures fewer mistakes and faster approvals, improving your team’s workflow and the overall customer experience.

3. Enhance Job and Production Management

Effective job management is crucial when your business relies on timely production and customer delivery dates. Tools like Printavo and InkSoft provide robust job management systems designed to streamline your production schedules and optimize equipment usage. Both tools are suitable if you’re looking for starting points on how to optimize your shop. 

Enhancing job and production management starts with a centralized system that connects your whole shop. The sooner your front office and sales have the same order information as employees finalizing customer designs and team members on the production chain, the better your overall results will be. A centralized system for job management significantly reduces costly misprints, missed deadlines, and inefficiencies.

Scheduling tools from Printavo allow you to assign tasks, track progress, and keep everyone accountable, ensuring jobs are completed on time and to the highest standard.

Moreover, Printavo and InkSoft are now integrated, so you get the best of both worlds in production management and e-commerce tools, all in a centralized setup. 

These types of improvements also improve employee morale. Simplified communication will make everyone’s job easier and let your teams focus on producing high-quality merch instead of rushing orders, cleaning up mistakes, or feeling burnt out. 

4. Improve the Customer Experience to Boost Sales 

It might sound obvious, but the easier your customers can place orders, the more likely you’ll see a bump in sales. One recent study found that most people expect to complete an online purchase in less than four minutes. Anything longer than that, and they start getting frustrated, which often leads to a lost sale, usually known as an abandoned cart in the e-commerce world. Simply put, if you want to know how to optimize your shop, improving your e-commerce approach is a good place to start. 

By offering branded online stores built with modern functionality, such as mobile optimization and secure checkouts, you can provide customers with a smooth, convenient shopping experience.

InkSoft offers tools to set up online stores, allowing customers to browse products, upload artwork, receive quotes, and make purchases all in one place.

Additionally, automation can play a crucial role in sales growth. If you can set up reorders quickly, update your customers on order statuses, and map out tasks on a comprehensive calendar, you’ll have a smoother quote-to-production flow. 

Printavo provides features like automated reorders and real-time order status updates, which help keep customers informed and satisfied. An automated system reduces the need for sales representatives to handle repetitive tasks, freeing them up to focus on high-value opportunities like prospecting for new customers. 

How to Optimize Your Shop: Putting it all Together

Improving these areas of your business is essential to staying competitive as customers continue to expect more of where they buy from and what they want out of an online shopping experience, even in the B2B market. 

With platforms like InkSoft, Printavo, and GraphicsFlow, you can simplify customer quoting, optimize artwork management, enhance job and production management, and increase sales through a better customer experience. 

Book a discovery call today to take advantage of our limited-time Inkmas discounts on Printavo, InkSoft, and GraphicsFlow. Save big when you get started with either Printavo or InkSoft or double the discount when you sign up for our family deal!