What to expect from a solution for personalized cards and invitations?

Christoph Clermont

Is your solution able to handle long text without trouble? Are you ready for mobile commerce? Can your designers seamlessly collaborate? If the answer is yes, you are well prepared to enjoy the benefits of a thriving market where customers order not just one item but multiple print pieces for their events. Learn all about it and try out three impressive samples.

As you can imagine, personalized greetings cards are a market of giant proportions. Among all the variations of cards there is one subset that is especially interesting for vendors that aim at higher margins with sophisticated personalization. And that´s invitations to all sorts of events. Take, for example, weddings. The average spend for a wedding in the US has been $28,000 in 2021, including no less than $530 for invitations. That is certainly quite a lot of money for a couple of printed materials.

The good thing about weddings, and other important events in life, is that customers are usually not done with ordering one card. Instead there will be multiple steps such as announcements, invitations, thank-you cards, and all sorts of materials for the event itself, including place cards, menu cards, seat plans and more… Instead of selling one fancy card layout you could actually provide shoppers with an entire “corporate design” for their event with a consistent look across all items.

That is also why at many shops for personalized event materials the configuration through the customer is done in a two-step process. Shoppers will first select predefined themes, color schemes, or photo styles and then move on to adapt these to their individual tastes and add their personal messages.

Be prepared to perfectly handle long text

While many personalized gifts work perfectly with just one name or a short slogan, event invitations are all about long text, and the freedom for customers to insert exactly the messages they want. This also means that the length of text that is entered can be extremely different. For invitations you will definitely need tools that handle multi-line body text and text wrapping well. Setting a fixed limit for length is an obvious solution, but will disappoint customers who crafted a lengthy message. So, one particularly helpful feature you should look for is auto-adaption of text that automatically changes the font size to match a certain area - and makes this also visible for customers during configuration.

One thing is sure when it comes to invitations. Accuracy is king and you cannot afford messy typesetting. Just imagine a customer has spent half an hour to design their perfect wedding invitation, and everything looked great in the preview. Then the printed product arrives and looks not only different but worse. The need to return an invitation will especially hurt customers because there may be not enough time left to send a new one. So better avoid unhappy customers - and a spoiled wedding - by doing it right across the entire process.

Make yourself ready for mobile commerce

More than 60% of e-commerce sales are already done on mobile devices and the numbers are rapidly increasing. For the online configuration of personalized print materials mobile basically means: everything´s different! A different user interface, touch surfaces, sliders, buttons, menus and everything else customers will use to individualize their documents. At the same time shoppers expect the exact same flawless result for their printed products. One commonly used solution is using different templates for mobile and desktop orders. This will of course put a great strain on your staff as everything needs to be built and administered twice, with the obvious result of higher cost and potential for error. Relying on a solution that uses just one template and then automatically generates the right user interface for any kind of device will come as a great relief. Going forward with your m-commerce business it´s worth checking out how smoothly Printess managed this issue.

Ensure your designers can seamlessly work together

As a vendor of invitations and greetings cards you will usually have to manage an extremely high number of versions. 20,000 or more different designs are not uncommon. To create these high numbers of layouts many vendors employ large teams of designers who need to collaborate. To make working efficient it will often make sense to split up the work and let designers work only on certain elements such as stickers or photo frames instead of entire layouts. By using a solution that allows you to create any design element independently from the products on which they will be applied, you will be able to fully exploit these efficiencies. In addition, you may want to include external designers in the workflow without the need for complicated handovers.

Learn more, get in touch Find out more about Printess - your solution for design, publishing, configuration and production of personalized gifts. Call us at +49 337 66 469 886, send an e-mail, or register for our free trial right away.

Samples included: All sample templates you can try out on this page are also part of the Printess license. You may use them as a simple basis to develop your own products, or as an inspiration for your designers.