New opportunities in business communications with inkjet

The communications market is changing and digitalisation continues to impact our everyday lives. Everywhere you look, brands are leading the consumer down the digital route. While traditional “transaction” applications, such as monochrome bank statements, invoices and policy documents are slowly fading into the past, new applications taking full advantage of today’s high-speed colour inkjet systems have emerged.

Marketers have been adapting the way they use print to communicate with their customers, making it more impactful with the use of colour. As a result, large corporates, public in-plants, print operators and IT and print service providers all started investing in advanced high-volume inkjet technology.

Business communication providers have seen a growth opportunity in promotional print and graphics arts applications. Brands have been turning up their volumes on business communications print in colour¹, so these print professionals now have a chance to direct their energies to printing marketing communications applications such as direct mail, brochures, posters, manuals, flyers and inserts.

By opening themselves up to the possibility of producing high quality, business communications, print operations have been able to expand their services, answering the increasing appetite for colour² applications.

This increase in demand for printed marketing communications has come about for a number of reasons: consumers trust print³, people like to file paper copies of important documents⁴ and furthermore, because of the increase in cybercrime⁵, customers feel safer having documents in printed format.

Now that inkjet technology has evolved in terms of image quality and speed, business communications providers feel confident in their ability to produce a wider range of applications. Because inkjet is so versatile and cost effective, large corporates, public in-plants, print operators and IT and print service providers can turn their capabilities to virtually any print job. Regardless of the size of the print run, these print facilities can rely upon their inkjet presses to produce a wide range of applications including flyers, inserts and brochures whether that’s on behalf of their in-house marketing department or external customers.

What’s coming next are hybrid print applications that leverage data processing and online communications capabilities, combining them with the quality and speed of inkjet technology. Having been accustomed to handling customer data when producing traditional transactional print, these print facilities are ideally suited to the production of today’s more sophisticated, personalised business communication applications.

Hybrid applications such as programmatic print and omnichannel are on the rise as brands look to deliver more joined up, cross channel campaigns that deliver a better ROI. Print providers must also prepare themselves to give brands more guidance on how print applications can be used to support digital communications, demonstrating how print can play a strong supporting role in the delivery of multi-channel communications.

Large corporates, public in-plant print operations, and IT and print service providers that are already in possession of high-speed digital inkjet engines, such as the Canon varioPRINT iX-series and the ColorStream 8000 series, have all the print power they need to tap into the growth in demand for business communications and support brands in the execution of effective omnichannel marketing campaigns.

Today’s inkjet technology combines offset-like quality, productivity and the ability to handle a vast media range, producing short runs of the widest range of applications.

Thanks to advances in inkjet technology, today’s engines can produce high quality print applications using a wider colour gamut so that printed marketing materials can consistently meet brand guidelines.

Speaking about extending the company’s print application portfolio beyond transactional print, thanks to the versatility and quality of colour applications produced on the varioPRINT iX-series, Christian Kempf from Atruvia AG says: “I felt confident that our print operation could boost its print volumes and handle a wider range of applications on a range of different media. Inkjet development has reached a level of maturity that opens up new opportunities for a wider range of applications. The engine is capable of so much more and it’s great to break into the market where we can produce high quality output on much thicker media, producing higher-end brochures, flyers and other pieces of marketing collateral.”

“We can also cater to customers that want much shorter run lengths. What impresses them the most is the offset-like quality of the finished product and our speed of turnaround,” he concludes.

“Due to the wider colour gamut of the ColorStream 8000, we have moved some of our work from offset onto inkjet,” comments Gunther Ruffing of DATEV eG. “We are now able to accurately reproduce our customers’ brand colours, which is opening up new opportunities for us, such as promotional inserts, individual note pads and flyers. Bringing this work in house not only makes better financial sense, but we can handle last-minute changes to copy and be more experimental with versioning to see which campaigns get the best results.”