If you run a small business you might have managed to make your office completely paper-free. But many of us still use printed materials like brochures, catalogues, business cards and compliment slips for customer communications and marketing.

In the olden days lithographic print was far too expensive for small business owners who needed small print runs. These days digital printing has brought small runs of top quality print within everyone’s reach. But it’s still worth taking a few common sense measures to keep the cost of business print as low as possible… and minimise waste.

Here’s how.

  • if you’re printing a brochure, catalogue or leaflet, don’t include time-sensitive or pricing information and leave out special offers. When you print variable information on a separate sheet for insertion instead, you won’t have to waste a load of printed materials and reprint the whole piece just because you need to put your prices up or down, change your special offer or include different dates
  • print what you need and no more. Digital print technologies charge less for machine set-up than litho printing so small quantities are affordable
  • take your printer’s advice if you need a large quantity printed. There’s a tipping point where litho print suddenly becomes cheaper than digital, and they’ll know exactly where it lies
  • think about photocopying. It soon gets horribly expensive, so ask your local digital print shop to see if a digital print run might be cheaper
  • think about using digital print to personalise marketing letters instead of putting them through your office printer. It might be cheaper and faster, and it’ll probably look better too. All you need is a digital file of customer details, for example name, salutation, job title and address, and a digital print shop will be able to merge existing stationery with the data to create perfect, low cost, beautifully printed personalised stuff, or print the lot, including your letterhead info and logo, from scratch