In other news, I’m delighted to advise that IBS is sponsoring the Enmore Design Centre’s graduating exhibition in Sydney. Showcasing the efforts of 24 third-year design students, the exhibition is taking place on Wednesday 3 December. It’s great to be able to support newcomers to the industry and I hope they spread the word about the great benefits IBS can bring any graphic design or print business.

Scott Siganto, Director

Please be aware that as Christmas approaches, our turnaround time may stretch to 7 days. However we are currently averaging 4.8 days and will endeavour to maintain this where possible.

It may also be advisable to mark your calendar with our holiday break: IBS will be closed from midday Tuesday 23 December 2008 until Monday 5 January 2009. Jobs sent through during this time will join a queue and be processed upon our return on 5 January.

As part of our commitment to customer service, we wish to obtain the best contact details of all our clients to update our new system. This involves giving us the contact name and email address for the best person to handle accounts, production, marketing, main contact and general enquiries. To best illustrate how this improves our service to you, please read the following description of our procedures:

When an order is booked in, the system automatically sends two emails – one to confirm that the job is in the system and another one that is exactly the same, but with an attached invoice. Both are called ‘Confirmation of IBS Order’ in the subject line. The first email is sent to your company’s production contact. The second should go to the accounts person at your company.

As your job progresses, further emails are sent to the production contact, including a ‘Printing and Despatch’ update and a ‘Despatch’ email. If this is currently not occurring as it should, please contact us so we can correct your company details in the system and ensure we’re talking to the right person at the right time!

We’ve had a few instances lately of job orders needing last-minute changes due to client requests. Now, knowing that it’s the silly season and starting to get rather hectic, we understand that there may be occasions when a typo slips through and you only notice after the order has been sent to us. However we do wish to highlight that we process jobs as soon as we receive them, which contributes to our fast turnaround.

If you need to cancel a job that has been submitted, you must speak directly to an IBS employee; you may not email or leave a voice mail for cancelling an order. If the job has not been plated and scheduled for production we will be happy to cancel your order. However if plates have been made, you will be responsible for full payment.

We recommend that you take special care checking your job to make sure it’s correct, before placing your order. This is particularly important as the pace picks up to Christmas and your jobs are placed on a run with our new MIS within a couple of hours of you sending the job through to us.

It’s the perfect time to remind your customers to prepare for the new year, and our stationery packs are a holiday gift in the shape of real value. Our 1,000 Stationery Pack is priced at only $352.00, containing 1,000 letterheads, 1,000 ‘With Compliments’ slips and 20 A5 notepads of 50 sheets each. Purchased separately, that’s $495.00 worth of products, meaning the packs are saving you a whopping $143.00!

Another way to look at it is you’re actually saving $22 on the letterhead and notepads and getting the ‘With Compliments’ slips for free! What a great opportunity for you to add some profit margin!

You’d have to be living under a rock not to realise that Christmas is merely around the corner. We have competitively priced greeting cards and calendars available to help you make the most of the holiday season, and to help make it easier for you, we’re even providing you with some promotional tools free of charge!

Already, more than 130 clients have downloaded the free greeting card poster and letter that we made available in the last edition of The IBS Independent. We’ve also launched tools for calendars now too. If you haven’t already done so,

Click here for the calendar letter
Click here for the greeting card letter
Click here for the calendar poster
Click here for the greeting card poster
Click here for the calendar templates and pricing
Click here for the greeting card templates and pricing

If you’re really time short at the moment, click here for our ready-designed calendars where you can simply drop in your customer’s logo.

And don’t forget to let us know how useful these tools are and what we can do to help you further!

Padded surveys and competition entry forms
A client recently created a marketing activity for one of their customers, whereby employees had to gather market research by knocking on doors. They needed an easy way to manage hundreds of survey forms, while keeping the employees’ loads as light as possible. The answer was A5 notepads designed to be filled out on the spot and the leaf simply turned over to keep the pages intact in the notepad. This meant there weren’t pages going missing and there was no need for a board to lean on when filling the survey out.

An extension of this idea is competition entry forms, whereby different entry locations can be allocated a number of notepads and each entry is simply torn out and placed in a barrel. When coupled with the extra finishing options available, such as numbering and perforations, the possibilities are endless!

It is also important to note (pardon the pun!) that our notepads come with the choice of 50 or 25 leaves. We’ve included their prices for your reference.