There are a number of goals decorators should have when building or updating their website. According to Mark Venit, president, Apparel Graphics Institute, Ocean Pines, Md., a leading marketing consultant, “A web presence needs to be perceived as helpful and organized to enable customers and prospects to have as easy an experience as possible in finding items they are interested in (and perhaps things they weren’t looking for when they arrived).”
“It also should help them get a handle on pricing and their options for spending more or less, and making a judgment about whether to do business with your company,” he adds.
One way of accomplishing these goals is to show off your technologies and facilities. “Make sure photos capture the people doing the work, not just the machines running,” advises Venit. “When possible, let your staff do the talking about their roles.”
Even if you don’t offer a decorating process in-house, make sure it is represented along with appropriate information about how it’s done and its quality.
Videos are a very effective tool that is now frequently used to show visitors work areas, the showroom, software, and products. “You don’t need to do anything fancy,” notes Venit, “most of the ‘home-grown’ videos I’ve seen do the job.”
One of the biggest advantages to investing time in your website is it shortens the buying process. Customers can visit 24/7 and get real-time answers to questions. “Your website, properly executed, saves your customers and prospects time and your company money. When customers are ready to call to ascertain final figures and details and place their order, they’ve gotten most of their questions out of the way. All this translates to a better prepared, more knowledgeable buyer who spends less time on the phone and issues faster purchase orders.”
Information for this blog was taken from “The Business of T-Shirts” by Mark L. Venit. For more information, visit http://www.stahls.com/business-of-tshirts-book.
If you have a website of your own, all of the Easy Prints® t-shirt designs can be added using the link to EasyPrints.com. The EasyPrints.com site does not have any contact information so it can be used as a generic online catalog of ideas for your customer.
For our current Dealers, you can add the link by logging-in at the dealer site, TransferExpress.com and select “Link to Easy Prints”. Follow the steps through to add the link.
Even if you don’t have your own site, you can give this site to your customer to look through the t-shirt designs.
Once your customer decides what design they like, have them call or email you the layout number and go to the dealer site to customize the layout for them. This design can then be emailed to your customer for final approval before placing the order for your screen printed transfers, creating a custom print with no artwork needed!
Learn more about becoming a Transfer Express Dealer here.
If you are interested in starting your own t shirt printing business using custom transfers, the question is where to start? There are a lot of different places to get educated. There is a terrific series of seminars given by Great Garment Graphics, www.greatgarmentgraphics.com at locations throughout the U.S. and Canada. Another source is sites such as www.t-shirtforums.com where you can learn from others who are in the same position. Another great source is the vendors themselves. Sites such as www.TransferExpress.com offer a lot of information and their trained staff can answer questions by phone or email.
