So much of the print work that gets done in our modern age is full colour leaflet printing. Very very little is black and white, and perhaps even less is done as 2 colour or three colour print. Bear this in mind and you’ll better understand what we’re going to talk about today.
So often when doing a quote for a print job, the customer always wants to find a way to make the job cheaper. The first thing to come into question is the quantity, but this is often a fixed thing. If someone needs 10,000 leaflets and they have a way to distribute them or a situation in which they can hand them out it doesn’t make any sense to have less done. Promo work of this type is a numbers game, so having a lot of leaflets is paramount.
Next to look at is the type of paper stock that we want to print flyers on. You can’t get much cheaper than the 130gsm silk option that is very popular with colour printers everywhere. A lot of printers don’t do a thinner coated option as it doesn’t feed very well through the machines, and the thinner yet uncoated paper, such as 100gsm offset, actually costs a little more anyway, so there’s no way of saving on paper.
At some point, after some discount-begging and general head scratching, the customer will often ask if it’s cheaper to do it as a two or three colour job when printing flyers, instead of full colour (4 colour). They are often surprised to hear that this simply isn’t the case. If a job is being done digital, only doing them black and white would save any money at all. The printer pays a fee every time a sheet goes through, and that cost is based on either black and white or full colour print – no price breaks for 3 colour. With litho print, the same is unfortunately true. Because litho printers do almost all 4 colour work, and savings they might have from using a lesser ink print process are lost because of the time it takes to change the machines over to do the job.
So how can you save money? Well, you might not get the price down, but you can get the quality UP with a company like www.auraprint.co.uk (you can get a site like theirs from web design manchester) With a lot of printing, especially large leaflet runs, it’s a percentage game when it comes to getting new customers. From a run of 10k, you might pick up 3% of that in customers. If you increase the quality of the design, or the print, you could increase that percentage as every little helps. THAT is a real saving – spending the same for more business coming your way.