Price It Right: A Guide to Print Services Package Pricing

Why Print Packages Pricing Matters 

Price is far from the only factor in a customer deciding to choose your print services. The quality of your work, speed of delivery, expert advice, ease of relationship and your ability to fit in last minute jobs when they really need it can all be important in deciding which print shop to use.

But even if it’s not the deciding factor, price will always be a factor. Price too low and not only do you miss out on income you could be enjoying, you also potentially set expectations for the future, making it difficult to raise prices later because you’re seen as being at the ‘budget’ end of the market.

Price too high, of course, and people may either choose not to use you in the first place or take their business elsewhere as your prices increase to levels they feel uncomfortable with.

Print package pricing, then, is about balance. Here’s how to achieve it.

How to Set Your Print Package Pricing 

There are many factors that play into setting your print pricing. These include:

Costs

No business can last long selling products and services for less than they cost to supply. So as a baseline, it’s vital to understand the cost of your business, it’s print materials and, crucially for print shops, how those costs break down across the packages you offer.

An ink or toner cartridge, for example, has a certain cost, but you’ll get lots of individual prints out of each one, so you need to understand the cost per item.

Your costs will be divided into the fixed costs of things like print shop rent, vehicles, equipment hire or monthly purchase costs and wages.

Variable costs will include energy, papers, vinyls, inks and other print essentials. Print management software can make it easier to identify individual unit costs.

Value

What is it that customers value most about what you do? It may be that you offer huge print runs at rock bottom prices, in which case you’ll need to price keenly and keep a constant eye on the competition to ensure you’re always one step ahead (see below).

On the other hand, your business may be built on niche capabilities, or the ability to produce work of a quality that beats your peers. Here, you may be able to charge more for the work you do because price isn’t your competitive advantage.

By understanding your true value to your customers, you can gain a clearer understanding of where you should pitch your print prices. 

Competitors 

We’re not suggesting that you should look at your closest competitor and simply do what they do — there are too many variables that may set you apart to make that a wise strategy. 

But it is important to be at least aware of what the competition is doing so you can factor it into your calculations if necessary. And if low print packages pricing is one of your major selling points, you’ll need to be extra vigilant to ensure you’re always competitive.

Margin

We’ve left this till last, but in many ways it should be first. Every company is in business to create customers and sell to them. And it can only keep doing that if it earns more than it spends. 

That means factoring in a profit margin on each of your print packages, so that each one earns you a little more than it cost to produce. We explore ways to set that profit margin below.

Print Package Pricing Models

There are ways of altering all of the above figures. You can reduce costs, for example, by shopping around or ordering in bulk. You can change your perceived value by, for example, choosing a higher quality print material or promoting its durability, waterproofing, UV resistance etc.

But of all the above print package pricing factors, none is more variable than margin. By choosing your approach to profit, you should finally be able to settle on a price for your print packages.

Options include:

• • • Bulk discounts: Price individual projects higher than bulk orders, where set up times per unit will be much less, so you protect profit margin for both types of order.
    • Loss leaders: Undercut the market by offering at or below cost prices on some print packages, where you know you can recoup any losses through cross sells, upsells and repeat business.
    • Loyalty builders: Increase margin for first time customers and offer discounts to longer standing customers to help lock in loyalty.
    • Introductory offers: The opposite of the above, designed to attract customers to you and away from competitors. Once a price conscious customer is with you though, you’ll need to keep offering value in order to stop them wandering off again.
    • Account model: A great way to lock in repeat business, give trade customers preferential account terms (such as a line of credit giving them a few additional days/weeks to pay), loyalty offers and the occasional freebie to say thank you. In return, you could secure larger trade accounts.
    • Subscription model: Do your customers make (roughly) regular orders of certain products? Offer tiered print packages with scaled prices, so they can pay a flat fee every month to get the print they need. Great for customers that want to even out their sprint spend to achieve monthly cost consistency. Equally good in terms of protecting your profit margins. 

Talk to Soyang

Whatever your approach to print packages pricing, Soyang’s print materials can support your pricing models. To find out more, talk to us.