Tips to Find New Clients for Your Print on Demand Store

Anna Navolokova, Marketing Manager in Multi-Programming Solutions  •  11 min read

A large customer base and frequent repeatable sales are desirable for every entrepreneur. Perhaps, these goals may seem reasonably achievable for POD companies due to their ability to personalize products for any taste. Still, everything depends on a deep knowledge of the target audience. Define its preferences, age, location, and presence to easily find clients online and keep them loyal to the brand.

In this article, we’ll talk about the importance of knowing consumer psychology, share a few marketing tips to get new leads, and describe some common mistakes every e-commerce entrepreneur should be aware of. 

Table of Contents

Study your potential customers' behavior

Never ignore short-run orders

Implement online marketing

Develop partnerships

Avoid these loopholes

Apply the best dropshipping techniques

Conclusion

Study your potential customers' behavior

Understanding who your buyers are is the most crucial aspect of any business. Without this essential data, it may be difficult to produce well-selling POD products, create content for the storefront or choose the most appealing ways to promote the printing business online. Consumer behavior refers to the set of actions and decisions clients make during the process of purchasing (including repeated one) and then using the selected item. Here’s how this knowledge can help you to find new customers and increase sales.

Product development

By learning what your clients want, you may create stuff that meets their expectations. POD service is perfect when it comes to flexible and quick solutions. You may examine current trends among your tailored users and customize products to satisfy market needs. Explore your customers’ desires among the most frequent Google queries and determine the best ways for your printing services advertising. Ask users’ opinions through social media profiles, or find what gaps in your rivals’ goods you may fix. Your clients will give you some insights on positioning your products better.

For example, if your buyers are people with a moderate budget, consider optimizing your pricing policy. If they are environmentally conscious, you may focus on producing eco-friendly stuff. Consider reusable materials and nontoxic production methods, use cardboard instead of plastic for packages, etc.

Hyper-personalization

How can you enhance your printing service by gathering data through browser history, social media activity, or purchase history? With this deep knowledge of your users, you can provide a more personalized experience from interactions with your brand. Thus, you can pick up suitable product recommendations or marketing messages to make clients return to the website and keep buying your products. 

Improved customers journey

With dozens of web analytical tools, you may learn how visitors interact with your brand, define website bottlenecks and make on-time improvements for perfect user experience (UX). For example, you can simplify the sign-up process, implement delayed payments and make an online store interface as smooth as possible to encourage sales. 

Moreover, analytical reports can give you useful information on how much time visitors spend on the site, which products they leave in shopping carts without further purchasing, and what pages have the most popular content.

Advertising

By understanding your target audience on a deeper level, you can create a more effective marketing campaign and reach the potential buyer. What are the best strategies to attract customers? Your online store will benefit if you provide targeted ads and personalized e-mail notifications. Use customer data and follow the latest industry trends to create word-of-mouth advertisements for your printing company.

Never ignore short-run orders

Many entrepreneurs make a mistake in avoiding small orders for their print on demand services. Still, it’s not recommended to ignore customers who buy one or two items. If you want to get more clients for a POD business and positively impact online sales, you better accept short-run purchases. Thus, you’ll show how much you care about each lead and will ensure that your brand provides equal opportunities for everybody. 

Your desire to focus only on large orders is understandable because wholesaling can save you money on packing and shipping. Moreover, you’ll get a faster turnover. And you definitely can apply the B2B model to grow faster. Still, satisfied clients with small purchases can unlock new ways to generate more traffic to your POD store. A simple positive customer review on social media may bring more users to your website.

How to deal with negative feedback if you develop a print on demand business?

Implement online marketing

Before spending money on advertisements, ensure you’ve done everything possible without any investments. Let’s start with social media. Today promoting own brands via dedicated online profiles remains one of the most popular and productive methods to reach customers of any age, gender, and taste, making the brand recognizable worldwide.

Free promotions

You may start with Reddit. Here, you should provide high-quality posts, receive as many votes from readers as possible, and your content will stay in the top positions among the website queries. Still, don’t add more than 10% of self-promotions to prevent a ban.

Now, let’s find out how to attract clients on Facebook.  The more active you are on a personal brand’s page, the more algorithm will show your group to the platform users. Post valuable content, create quizzes, respond to clients’ comments, and your business will grow together with the community. 

To make your efforts successful on Facebook, optimize your profile description, add relevant keywords to the content, make your posts shareable, and provide a call to action (for example, the “Join us” button). Also, compile strict rules for admins and followers to ensure the highest level of customer support.

If you wonder whether you can get clients on Instagram, we can ensure this platform offers the best shopping experience for its 2 billion users and has the highest ROI for selling items directly in the app. So start creating a personal page dedicated to your printing business, upload high-quality photos, and write engaging stories appealing to the public. 

Interestingly, Instagram users spend around 30% of their time watching reels, so you can try to create viral promotional videos following the latest trends and using popular hashtags (you can search them on your rivals’ accounts as well).

Collaboration with influencers

Think who can become your brand’s ambassador. It can be a fitness trainer, content creator, or other person with a large number of subscribers. One of the creative ways to get new customers is by offering free samples to the influencer in exchange for their promotion. Suppose your printing service makes customized water bottles. Then your ambassador can download a video where your product is used in practice during the morning run.

You may as well offer discount codes for customers who will purchase your stuff or provide exciting contests with prizes. For example, the first five followers who will repost the branded item can receive it for free. 

Paid ads

Although this method may be expensive for startupers, it remains an efficient marketing plan for the printing business that wants quickly increase traffic and bring more sales. You may consider Facebook or Instagram ads that can be targeted at people of various demographics, locations, and ages. Still, you should remember that around ⅔ of Instagram users are between the age of 18 - 34. So ensure your printed stuff is valuable for this category of clients.

Develop partnerships

Creating a multi-vendor marketplace is one of the best tips to get clients for a new business. While you, as a printing provider, are mainly focused on the production line, designing new trendy items, and shipping to the end customer, you need reliable partners who will generate sales. Connecting your POD service with affiliate stores through dropshipping software will help you explore wider geographics of sales, reach new markets and increase revenue. 

Along with distributors and resellers, entrepreneurs may also consider complementary partnerships with businesses that are related but not directly competitive. For example, if you produce customized swimsuits or beach towels, you may mutually advertise hotel&resort companies sharing each others’ products and services among customers.

What is the Channel Partner in Your Print on Demand Business

Avoid these loopholes

Now that you know what are the best ways to get new leads for your print on demand store, let’s learn some common mistakes which can make your promotional campaign useless. Go through the points below, and your brand development process will remain painless:

• Don’t target the wrong audience because you risk not getting a good return on investment (ROI). Always build your marketing strategies based on consumers’ preferences and clearly understand what, why, and where your clients need the product.
• Avoid high discount offers. Of course, such an approach can seem to be one of the best customer loyalty programs. But in fact, you risk losing profit or producing low-quality goods to save costs. In the last case, it can negatively impact your brand’s reputation, which can be hard to recover.
• Don’t focus on short-term goals only. Small results may be admissible when you need to launch a business quickly or survive a market crisis. But if you want continuous development and growth, you should invest in a meaningful strategical plan.  

We’ve figured out what you should avoid while marketing your printed products. And now, let’s talk about today's must-have for any thriving e-commerce business - automated software.

Apply the best dropshipping techniques

As a POD store owner, your task lies in providing the best service level, including product quality and a perfect overall experience from interacting with a brand. 

Print on demand software solutions like Podza can ensure a convenient selling process for all the participants. The app integrates with online stores on the most popular e-commerce platforms, including Shopify, eBay, Etsy, WooCommerce, and others. It helps to automatically redirect customers' purchases from connected stores to the fulfilling printing center. Thus, the app owner doesn’t have delays in accepting orders and can simultaneously manage sales on multiple channels.

Customers want you to print and deliver their items as fast as possible. They will also appreciate receiving tracking information and clearly understanding its costs. And Podza solution perfectly copes with all the described tasks.

If you compete with other printing companies for trustworthy sellers with a broad customer base, integrated dropshipping software is one of the main reasons why collaborating with you may become beneficial for both sides. Connected vendors don’t have to send customers’ orders manually, and can easily import printers’ products, generate invoices and download suitable designs. So with Podza POD, entrepreneurs can organize a smooth selling process and encourage other vendors to join them.

Conclusion

Now you know how to sell printing services, attracting more clients to your online store. First, you should ensure you’ve learned the target audience well to satisfy their requirements. Check whether you have the answers to all the following questions before you begin to plan a promotional campaign. What are your customers’ needs and motivations for buying? What factors impact their decision-making? Is it easy and convenient for clients to interact with your company? What selling channels bring the majority of your profit? 

By understanding your users’ behavior, you may develop a thoughtful customer loyalty marketing campaign. It will appeal to the majority of potential buyers and make your product stand out. If you find a suitable way to generate more traffic for the printing service, increased profits will not be long in coming.