Corporate Stationery – Part of your business image

“No one uses corporate stationery these days” I hear people say. With everything digital and on the internet everyone is use to being communicated with in that format. If you do need to print something off, the quality of cheap small printers combined with templates setup in computer applications means you would never need to use pre-printed stationery ever again. If that was the case, then why have I taken several orders for such items in the last month? Put simply, pre-printed stationery in all its forms is a cost effective and powerful marketing tool for your business. Allow me to expand on this.

The biggest reason why people don’t buy pre-printed stationery, like letterhead or compliment slips, is the perceived cost. Why spend over $200 to get a thousand sheets of A4 letterhead when you can print your company logo and contact details as part of the print content on your office printer. In reality you are actually wasting money needlessly. Personal and smaller business printers don’t have large ink tanks, especially in colour, and quickly use them up in a couple of hundred pages. When you are paying at least a $100 to get a complete set of inks for a printer, you can quickly see that the real cost of printing the letterhead yourself is very expensive. A rough rule of thumb, printing a normal business letter will cost you about a $1+ if you print everything on it with colour, in comparison to less than $0.40 to printing black text only on pre-printed stationery.

Another factor that people don’t think about is the perception of professionalism by the customers. Domestic and small volume business printers can’t print to an edge of a page so everything you print off will have a thin white margin on the outside edge. People will always perceive such look as being less professional; the logic being that if a business can’t be bothered spending time and money on getting the professionally printed paper, is that how they will treat my custom. And of course, cheap office printers do not have the same quality as high-end lasers or offset presses like we use.

Even the paper you use effect the perception of how you look to customers. Stationery printed on 100gsm letterhead paper feels and looks more professional than your dirt cheap 80gsm copier paper.  While you can buy heavier weight papers, you will see a marked jump in the price per 100 sheets killing any saving you think you make by printing it yourself. This jump gets worse the second you leave the standard size of A4. It’s not uncommon for the price per ‘square meter’ to double or triple for the next size up or down. Pre-printed stationery factors the actual paper size to give you the roughly same square metre price no matter what size you chose.

Something that no domestic printer can do is including special finishing. Need the paper to be cut to special shape? Want to include a tear off section, include a glue strip or reinforced areas? All of these features you can’t find on paper sold in retail stores. They require special equipment, training, and time you don’t have. All this can be done with pre-printed stationery with a reasonable cost increase. Custom finishes make your material memorable to your clients and clients who remember you will call on you again.

The final reason that people don’t want to use pre-printed stationery is the hassle. They don’t want to have to muck around with design the material and organising the production; that is assuming that they know who to deal with to get it done. You don’t’ need to have hassle when we at Copy Express can do it all for you. We have the specialists, the technology, and the time to do it and to get it done right at a price cheaper that what it would cost for you to do it yourself.

This has been my little bit on corporate stationery and why you should use it. Wanting to know more? Why not contact us to get pricing or to book a meeting and we can show you what we can do for you.