The market for custom corrugated and folding carton boxes is flourishing, driven by the increasing demand for unique and personalized packaging solutions. These boxes are ubiquitous in packaging, branding, and protecting products in transit. Your business could leverage web-to-print technology to boost its operational capabilities and meet this demand efficiently. This guide places the roadmap to success in your hands to start and grow a custom corrugated and folding carton box printing business using web-to-print technology.
Step 1: Define Goals, Digital Strategy, and Metrics
Before launching your web-to-print box printing project, you must define your goals, digital strategy, and metrics. Identify the business problems you aim to solve, establish your value proposition, and pinpoint your target audience. Outline the activities required to achieve these goals and set clear metrics for success.
Example 1: Customization Capabilities for WooCommerce Storefront
- Goal: Add customization capabilities to an existing WooCommerce storefront.
- Target Audience: Local food and beverage manufacturers.
- Marketing Strategy: Launch a marketing campaign targeting manufacturers in nearby states.
- Success Metrics: Achieve $500K in sales in the first year and 30% of clients placing more than one order.
- Future Expansion: If successful, expand offerings to local wineries.
Mark owns a printing business in Sonoma, California, and wants to give his customers in the local food and beverage industry the ability to personalize their packaging. He decides to add customization capabilities to his website’s existing WooCommerce storefront. Following a localized marketing campaign targeting manufacturers in the Pacific Northwest, the project is a big success in the first year with $560K in sales and 37% of customers making repeat orders. On the back of these good numbers, Mark moves to expand his personalization capabilities to accommodate vineyards in California’s famous wine country.
Example 2: Simplify B2B Ordering Process
- Goal: Simplify the ordering process for B2B clients in the electronics sector.
- Target Audience: Existing B2B clients.
- Initial Implementation: Connect the first 10 B2B clients to the system.
- Success Metrics: Reduce order processing costs by 50% and increase customer satisfaction.
- Future Expansion: If successful, enter the B2C box market.
Jen owns a packaging firm in Dallas, Texas. She notices a gap in the market that could cut costs on order processing for her B2B customers in the electronics market. By offering individual client portals for ordering custom packaging, she quickly gains her first 10 B2B clients, who are thrilled with the ability to store branding assets, the new streamlined ordering process, and the ease of making repeat orders. She doesn’t see why she can’t replicate the success with a broader personalization market and decides to expand her services to B2C clients.
These examples demonstrate how a clear vision extending from your initial goal to implementation and beyond can guide a new custom corrugated and folding carton box printing project to success. Now let’s take a detailed look at the steps to make it happen for your business!
Step 2: Evaluate Current Resources
It’s important to take stock of your current resources to see what you have and what you need before leaping into a new product offering. Skipping this step could result in overinvestment into resources you already have or underinvestment where you need it most. Evaluate your existing automation tools, developer capabilities, and storefront infrastructure to determine where your business stands.
Automation: Successfully implementing web-to-print technology for personalizing packaging relies on efficient automation. Understanding the strong and weak points of automation in your existing business processes is a key step to getting the project off the ground.
Development Team: Assess the status of your development team. Do you have enough in-house resources for the project, or will you need to outsource some of the work? Perhaps you have an in-house team but consider if their level and areas of expertise are the right fit for the project.
Current Storefronts:Review your existing storefront’s capabilities and infrastructure. If you already offer personalization for certain products,determineif your existing web-to-print solution isrobustenoughfor customizingcorrugated and folding carton boxes.
Step 3: Determine Product Catalog and Storefront Organization
Once your vision and strategy are set, detail your product catalog, what options will be available for each product, and how they will be priced accordingly. Of course, defining your product range and pricing is important, but don’t overlook how the customer will navigate your shop.
Product Offerings: Define the range of corrugated and folding carton box products to offer. Think about who your target market is and what types of products would best serve their needs. Will you specialize in a specific narrow niche or offer a broader range of products?
Storefront Organization: Plan the organization of the product catalog in the storefront. Nothing will send a customer to a competitor quicker than a frustrating shopping experience. Put yourself in their shoes to design an experience that will keep them coming back. Consider how the customer’s path in your shop for ordering boxes might differ from ordering the current products you offer.
Product Options: Some of your product offerings might have different options that end-users can configure in your shop. Determine which products have what options, how users can select them, how it will affect the price, and what users see on the page when they switch between them.
Pricing Policy: Establish a pricing strategy that ensures profitability and aligns with the business model. Consider the long-term costs of your custom packaging project and what price point would guarantee its sustainability and open the door to possible expansion in the future.
Step 4: Map Out the Personalization Process
Based on your vision and target audience, determine the best personalization options for your customers. Does your target audience prefer a clean slate to design from scratch or would it be better to offer them a range of templates to choose from? Either way, a smooth interface that easily guides them through the process will boost customer satisfaction and increase the chances of repeat orders.
Artwork Options: The type of artwork options you offer your customers depends on a lot of factors. If they are B2B clients, they might have their own design teams that have completed artwork files. They may also have the know-how to design from scratch in your interface. On the other hand, you may want to provide predesigned templates to B2C customers that lack design skills or offer design services from your own team.
User Interface: Do your users a favor and make their shopping as seamless as possible. It doesn’t take much for a frustrated customer to click off your site and head to the competition. An intuitive customization and ordering workflow that works on desktop or mobile and supports features like 3D previews keeps happy clients coming back to your shop in the future.
Step 5: Handling Print-Ready Files
Once the customer pays for an order, the journey to fulfillment begins with file transmission. Decide how print-ready files will be sent to your production facility or fulfillment partner, whether by FTP, Email, or API request to your MIS system. Your choice will depend on your existing workflow, and perhaps you may rethink how you currently handle files if you are updating to a new web-to-print solution for the project.
Step 6: Identify Jobs to be Done
Building your custom corrugated and folding carton box printing business from the ground up might seem daunting at first, but any project becomes more manageable by chunking the tasks. Identify the tasks required to launch your project, like integrating the web-to-print editor, preparing the product catalog, and organizing templates and other assets.
Integrate Web-to-Print Editor: Once you find a web-to-print solution suitable for your project, integrate the editor into your existing storefront or create a new storefront. Not all solutions are created equally — some prepackaged out-of-the-box solutions may lack the features you need or aren’t as simple to integrate. Consider a web-to-print solution like Customer’s Canvas that has a long track record of successful integrations for online shops with personalization.
Product Catalog Preparation: Prepare the product catalog along with variations in size, shape, color and other attributes. Determine how users selecting different options might affect the final price of a product.
Template Preparation: B2B clients without their own design team will benefit from a library of assets they can choose from right within your shop. Even more so B2C clients who don’t have any design skills and simply want to quickly personalize a box. Develop templates, image libraries, and other design resources they can use to easily create something that looks polished and professional.
Step 7: Project Implementation
Your project is at its most vulnerable when you’re ready to hit the Start button. Manage it vigilantly and prepare to be agile to adapt to any unexpected issues that might arise. Gathering feedback before introducing it to customers could also help you catch and iron out any wrinkles before they end up costing you.
Project Management: Use project management tools to track progress and ensure timely completion. These allow to you divide up, schedule, and assign smaller tasks amongst your team so tasks can be completed concurrently, and everyone is aware of their role.
Reacting to Changes: Even the best laid plans have hiccups. Be flexible and ready to adapt to any changes or challenges that arise during implementation. Try to identify potential pain points before the launch so you can quickly pivot if necessary.
Feedback Gathering: Conduct a pre-launch review to gather feedback from stakeholders and make necessary adjustments. Such a preliminary assessment is yet another opportunity to catch any problems before they reach your customers when the project is live.
Step 8: Planning and Resource Estimation
With a detailed plan and accurate accounting of resources, you reduce the chances of going over budget or encountering delays. Implementing risk mitigation strategies will help you avoid these issues and keep your project between the guardrails.
Project Plan: Formulate concise steps and a timeline to project completion. Try to be realistic about the timeline and see that it correlates with the development resources you have at hand and how much your staff can take on at each step.
Resource Estimation:Knowing what you have available in your arsenal and theadditionalresources yourequirefor your custompackaging projecthelps paint a pragmatic picture of viability and scale.Determineyour budget, time, and personnel availability before implementation andmonitorit closely from start to finish.
Risk Mitigation: Any new project will have unexpected issues crop up from time to time. Prepare for them in advance rather than getting caught off guard without any strategies in place to soften the blow or avoid most of them altogether.
Step 9: Post-Launch Activities
Initiating a well-planned project is a big achievement, but the work doesn’t stop there. Once you launch your new offering, you can focus on plenty of other activities to guide the project to success. Marketing campaigns, performance tracking, and employee training are all steps you can take to ensure your efforts pay off and open the door to further expansion.
Marketing Campaigns: Make sure new and existing customers alike know about your new product offerings and the ease of the ordering and customization process with web-to-print. Targeted marketing campaigns will bring in the right clients who are seeking out a custom packaging solution.
Performance Tracking: It’s difficult to gauge the success of your project without monitoring how your storefront is performing. Pay close attention to numbers such as impressions, clicks, and conversions to see if any problem areas need shoring up.
Employee Training: Any new system will take some getting used to. Provide your employees with clear instructions and training to ensure handling orders and the new system goes smoothly. If your big debut goes off without a hitch, it will go a long way to getting repeat business from your first customers. A well-trained staff can prevent a buggy launch that might give a bad first impression.
Conclusion
With a foundation built on the advantages of web-to-print technology, you can start and grow a custom corrugated and folding carton box printing business. Your success will depend on how well you define clear goals, evaluate resources, implement a strategic plan, and effectively manage your project at each step. Finding the right web-to-print solution for your unique business goals will also give you a leg-up in a competitive space with increasing demand. You can start your journey into this new niche today by exploring Customer's Canvas web-to-print solutions to level up your business with a vast range of capabilities to position your business for success in the custom packaging industry.
