Printing plus Services

Managing and using data effectively is a very specialized area of business operations. Except for the very large corporates that have divisions dedicated to this work, others need a partner to work with them to optimize their use of data services for campaign management. Efficient and accurate data processing is critical to ensuring that any campaign gets the right message across to the right people in the right way. This is difficult enough when done online. When it comes to the physical distribution of printed material, the complexity increases manifold. Your printing partner must be able to offer you not just printing services but, also design and media support. When working with a printing and communications partner you need one that will offer you complete mailing list management services.

Services to look for in your printing partner:

• Inventory management and distribution: Your partner must have the ability to warehouse, package and ship your material to the people it is meant for, irrespective of location.
• A secure web interface: You must be provided with a customized and branded web interface that is specifically optimized to your commercial requirements.
• Focused targeting: Customized variable data and mail merge will allow for a number of data fields to be used to send customized messages to specific clients or groups. The more personalized a communication is, the greater the attention the recipient will give to it and the higher the recall value.
• Controlled data entry: Manual data entry is often required to merge, suppress or eliminate duplicates and unwanted records. This ensures that the data is clean and accurate.
• Cost effective transmission: Databases need to be sorted to ensure that the maximum number of postal discounts are made available.
• CASS certification: This ensures that address records are verified and standardized to meet U.S. Postal Service requirements.
• National Change of Address: NCOA minimizes the volume of mail that is not delivered, delayed or returned. The savings on both printing costs and postal charges can be significant.
• Inquiry Processing: Feedback and inquiry processing are crucial to campaign success. They can also take up a lot of operational time and manpower. Your partner must be able to process the inputs received and send them to you in a structured and organized manner to allow you to follow up effectively.
• List creation: A partner that will be able to provide you with market defined lists will enable you to refine your message to suit specific market groups.
• Distribution: Quick order processing and response along with the ability to offer printing on demand, same day shipment, live tracking and reporting will enable you to send only what is needed to the place it should be, at the time it needs to be there. Real time inventory management and order processing systems are needed to ensure that these services are optimized.
• Web based administration: This will ensure that distribution management and maintenance operates as efficiently as possible.

Hillview DPM has what you need to provide you with the support you require – years of experience, state of the art hardware and software and personnel who can maximize the effectiveness of the tools at their disposal. Our long list of clients, most of who mare leaders in their fields, is proof of this.

Ring in the Season with Greeting Cards

Fall has bedecked nature in her glorious earthy colors and the opening lines of California Dreaming come to mind – “All the leaves are brown and the sky is grey.” The weather all over the country has dropped several degrees and the chill in the air has everybody huddling in warm clothes, drinking hot chocolate and sitting besides dancing fires.

Year 2015 and we are past Halloween and the pumpkins. Tis now time to look forward to Thanksgiving and the Holiday season. The merchandisers are all busy getting ready for their grand black Friday sale and are bracing up for the intensive Christmas shopping that will begin, thereafter. The holiday season is the “Season of Giving” and also the time to reach out to all your loved ones and everybody you know, on a personal or business level, to spread the holiday cheer. The most special way you could spread that cheer is to send a greeting card with warm wishes for a joyous season. It is fun and beautiful to see Greeting Cards strung on a line and bedecking the halls and hall ways, adding that extra touch of warm color to cold winter days.

Greeting cards have been used since time immemorial. The ancient Egyptians gifted warmly crafted messages to each other on papyrus scrolls, ancient Indians did the same on palm leaf scrolls, and the Chinese - on silk scrolls. But it was not until the 1400s that handmade paper cards started appearing in Germany. Gothenburg’s mechanical printing press invented in 1450, made it easy to create greeting cards. From the mid-16th century onwards, Valentine Cards were being exchanged in England, and ever since then greeting cards have only grown in usage through the centuries.

Printed greeting cards are still the most popular way of sharing the spirit of the holiday season, this despite the onslaught of e-greeting cards, Facebook, Whatsapp and innumerable social or business networks. The printed greeting card industry in the USA is a multi-billion dollar industry with a sales of 8 billion. (source: http://www.greetingcard.org)

What makes Greeting Cards so Popular?

1. More personal: Paper greeting cards have become more classy and sophisticated with time, both in terms of imagery and the messages that go with it. One could choose a card with just the right look, feel and message, which can be a challenge in e-Cards.
2. More caring: There is a mind-boggling variety of printed, readymade cards available today. Driving up to a store, selecting a card, buying it and then mailing it, requires some amount of a person’s personal effort, which demonstrates how much you care. This effort lends that special touch to the greeting card that you send.  
3. Cost factor: Greeting cards are more expensive than any form of online greeting messages. So, this shows a certain commitment and respect to the relationship, something which everybody seeks.
4. Enduring nature:  Greeting cards are a popular collector’s item among girls and women of all age groups. It’s nice to reminisce about the good old days by looking at hundreds of cards collected over the years. Contrast this with e-cards which get deleted in a day or two.

HillView Printing DPM understands the emotive appeal of greeting cards. As one of the leading market digital printers, we routinely help customers print their own personalized greeting cards. You can walk in to our centers with your choice of content (or we can even create that for you), choose the right kind of paper, and have the card printed out using the most suitable printing technology.

Being creative and delighting you is what we cherish most at HillView. And isn’t that what greeting cards are all about?

Green Printing on Eco-friendly Watches

Going green and being eco-friendly have become the watchwords this past decade. Saving our planet earth, for the use of our progeny and the future generations, decreasing the filling up of landfills with waste products, such as un-degradable products like plastic, and promoting healthy trends in every walk of life, would go a long way in preserving this planet for posterity.

The world of fashion has contributed towards the “Green Trend” and “Eco-friendly watches” are now in vogue. Both men and women, today, sport these trendy “eco-friendly watches”, and they are cost-effective, with the ‘eco’ in the name expanding to girdle “economic fashion”.

So how exactly are eco-friendly watches different from the regular ones?

An average watch has more than a hundred different parts that are manufactured using different materials. The materials are determined depending on several factors, such as functionality of the part, its cosmetic effect, durability, weightlessness, and compactness without compromising on efficiency.

Eco-friendly watches comprise of parts made from materials that are manufactured using:

1. The minimum of energy-intensive processes
2. Recyclable metals and materials
3. Alternative energy as power source
4. Non-abusive methods of human rights

Point 4 refers to mining or manufacturing of materials that does not displace indigenous communities, does not make use of child labor, and is not funded by criminal or terrorist groups. Eco-friendly watches are economically sized and designed to reduce the quantity of materials used. Warranties are provided for longer durations, so that the product lasts long, thereby preventing the use and throw tendency.

Moreover, eco-friendly watches go beyond just the environment and addresses sustainable manufacturing, which resonates the CSR (corporate social responsibility) agenda of corporate companies. Understandably why, eco-friendly watches are so popular with corporate employees, bought for personal use, or for gifting.

Gifting watches have always been a great gifting idea and many people who love wearing trendy, fashionable accessories, tend to have quite a collection of watches in different shapes, sizes, colors, metals, materials and brands. Corporate gifting of watches for occasions such as celebrating an employee’s service to the company or as promotional products or even as a give-away to mark the company’s years of service and success, always make these gifts the most treasured possessions. Printing the company’s logo, details of the event, or even just the name of the corporate, lends even more value, to the possessor of this eco-friendly gift. It is a great way to leave an indelible footprint to branding your company’s image, logo and market presence.

Further, eco-friendly watches can also be made more attractive with digital print designs on the dial, glass and strap, making them as aesthetically pleasing as they are ecologically sensitive.

In keeping with the “Green Trend”, imprinting on eco-friendly watches has taken a new turn. Advanced technology together with specialty inks and additives, lend a whole new dimension to brand imaging, and marketing of your products and services, through promotional products, like eco-friendly watches.

The printing industry has kept abreast with the green movement and one of the changes is the development of eco-friendly inks that enable high printing quality without the harmful effects of the additives that are there in traditional inks.

Eco-friendly inks manufactured and used by the printing industry today include:

• Inks such as the Hybrid System Inks, which require no heat processes to cure it
• Inks manufactured from Soy. Soy based inks, unlike inks manufactured from a petroleum base, are brighter, provide more vivid colors and do not release inordinate emissions into the atmosphere
• Vegetable inks with low volatile organic compounds

Choosing eco-friendly products and versions, business houses can save on costs, protect their employees, clients and prospectshealths, and the environment as well.

Foam Sports-balls: Promoting brands and sports alike

The relationship between corporate sponsorships and sporting events is as old as sporting events in the twentieth century. Sports being the best metaphor for life, people are naturally drawn to sports and sporting events. The advent of television gave a big boost to sports and hence corporate sponsorship of sporting events. 

Football, Baseball and Basketball being the most popular sports in Europe and the United States of America, it is only natural that corporate America, would vie with each other to corral a larger portion of the sponsorship pie. For example, sponsorships were 7.8% ofthe advertising budget in 1985, and increased to 13.9% in 2006 (source BMI Sport info).Coca-Cola shelled out $40 million as the official sponsor of 1996 Olympic Games and $500 million to maintain the primary sponsor status. When NEC dropped out of sponsorship of the 2004 PGA tour, Bridgestone took their place and used the event to promote Bridgestone Golf. 

Corporate Sponsorship of sports has gone beyond billboards and T-shirts emblazoned with the team’s logos. Corporates are giving away small promotional items with their company logos and taglines printed on them to select fans, at such events. These items are smaller in number and create a feeling of exclusivity to the recipient. This increases the emotional connect with the brand and word-of-mouth marketing from delighted fans. 

One such popular giveaway in recent times has been foam sports-balls. Made of either dense or soft foam, these balls are designed to look exactly like a real baseball, basketball, footballs, or golf ball. In fact, foam footballs have also been used in matches instead of the game football as they are considered safer in case of fans in the stand being hit by the ball. Such foam sports-balls have been used in different events and for different reasons. For one, they grab attention with the bright coloring of the company logo and secondly, they last longer than mugs, T-shirts or bags that get damaged or replaced easily.

• Soft Foam Football: Best suited for rallies or sports banquets. It can also be sold in college bookstores or in the stadium on the game day. Can be used as one of the elements in a national or regional promotional campaign.
• Soft Foam Basketballs: Best suited for corporate sponsoring a particular team. The ball with the winning team’s logo makes for a great memento. They pop up in college dorms and position the school or university as sport loving.
• Dense Foam Baseballs: These make for a great promotional giveawayat school, college, or university tournaments.
• Large-sized, dense-foam Footballs: The larger than normal (game) size makes these a standout at parties and football events. They also make for a gift item for children and adults alike.
• Dense Foam micro Baseballs: These are cost-effective yet eye-catching promotional tools that can be giveaways at any tournaments as a gift to young people. 
• Dense Foam Basketballs: Ideal giveaway at games, or best used for product launches.
• Dense Foam Soccer Balls; These come in a wide variety of colors and make for a great giveaway or gift to people of all ages.
• Dense Foam mini Basketballs: These are popular gifts exchanged at summer camps, organized by the school or by the boy/girl scouts.

Foam sports-balls are a lot less intrusive than television ads and are more effective in reaching specific segments of viewers - the ardent sports fan. This segment is only growing and represents a great opportunity for marketers. 

HillView’s printing expertise makes us a partner of choice for corporate companies looking at innovative printing solutions for all kinds of paraphernalia including foam sports-balls.