Brebner Print runs one of New Zealand’s biggest and most technologically advanced commercial printing operations with branches in Auckland, Waikato, Bay of Plenty, Hawke’s Bay, Manawatu and Wellington.

The company has an annual turnover of about $35 million-$37 million and employs 200 staff, 100 of them based in Auckland. 

It has the capacity to deal with today’s tight and critical deadlines, ever-changing market demands and increasing quality expectations. The company is flexible, well resourced and poised to seize new opportunities and as a result services clients’ needs in an exceptional way.

The company maintains one of New Zealand’s most highly automated print production facilities. It specialises in high quality colour offset printing and manages more than 50 magazine titles, both soft and hardcover books, company annual reports as well as promotional materials such as brochures, flyers and posters.

One of the company’s key business strategies is its commitment to use new technology to consistently enhance the quality of its products and services. This is reflected both in its state-of-the-art printing plant and in the technology it has deployed to provide a high level of service to its clients. For example, Brebner Print has introduced an online ordering tool for its bigger clients that provides real time tracking of jobs, online proofing and previews of the jobs.

Customer Service And Branding Challenge

One challenge the company has faced in recent times is communicating effectively with its clients in a highly professional manner and improving the delivery of its services in the process.

As usual the company sought a leading edge solution that allowed it to use the latest technology to boost both staff productivity and customer satisfaction.

The vast majority of Brebner Print’s communications are conducted via email so ideally the company needed a digital solution. The solution would have to provide a vehicle for both promoting the company’s brand and at the same time allow it to improve the process of delivering quotes and estimates to customers.

In the past the company employed a manual method for emailing quotes that was not only time-consuming for staff but also failed to project a professional look and was cumbersome and unappealing for customers to use.

Using this manual method required a number of steps to be undertaken. Firstly, Brebner staff would go to the company’s CRM system, enter customer details followed by details of the quote. Secondly, they would either print the quote as a rtf. file, then go to Outlook and create a new email, attach the previously saved rtf. file and send both the email and the quote document. Or alternatively, get a printout of the quote then fax it.

In addition, both the email and quote document were sent out unbranded, and therefore missing out on opportunities to communicate the company’s brand and also failing to project the professional image necessary for a company that is directly involved in the brand image business and operating in the business-to-business market with a large number of advertising agency clients.

Software Solution With Extra Benefits

Brebner Print turned to Calcium Software, a New Zealand-based intuitive e-marketing software development company. The company specialises in devising, building and delivering smart, flexible and easy-to-use email software solutions that provide tangible outcomes for clients.

Calcium Software mailPrimer real-time branding solution perfectly matched Brebner Print’s requirements and provided many additional benefits that the company was not aware were available.  

Firstly for the quotes, MailPrimer automated most of the processes that were previously done manually by creating quote templates that could be sent out in the body of the email itself, instead of the traditional attached rtf. file.

Using mailPrimer, Brebner staff would also go to the CRM system, enter customer details and send an email from the CRM to mailPrimer. But the next round of steps, which they would normally have undertaken manually, was all automated by mailPrimer.

mailPrimer automatically checks all email it receives for specific text, for example with a quote the text may read, “Please find attached the requested quote…” When mailPrimer finds the matching text it switches to the quote template, looks for quote details, cuts details, generates on-the-fly html tables, then pastes the quote details into the html table, adds the sender’s details and sends the email.

The system’s key benefits are that by automating the quote creation and sending process, Brebner Print staff can provide quotes to their customer much faster and in a much more professional manner. As more and more customers are now working remotely in a wireless environment they are now demanding the delivery of timely quotes. For Brebner Print staff, this means mailPrimer frees up the time they would have spent working on creating and sending quotes. The technology has also eliminated the ‘paper mountain’ that resulted from the manual system.

Secondly, using mailPrimer Brebner Print can now brand both its emails and quotes and project a consistent image across all its email communications, as one person takes responsibility for centrally creating the look and branding for all its mailPrimer email and quote templates. The templates can also provide dynamic links to relevant pages on the company’s website and to new products and services, allowing the company to truly interact with customers and keep them regularly updated on new developments.

MailPrimer also provides additional benefits - normally confined to email newsletters such as monitoring email delivery - so that Brebner Print can now identify anonymously whether a sent quote has been read. The new system also tracks links and information Brebner Print stakeholders are interested in so that it can refine its market segmentation and therefore communicate more effectively.

Taking Email Communications To ‘New Level’

Brebner Print Sales Manager Steve Wilton-Jones says, “mailPrimer is a breakthrough solution that takes email communications to a new level”.

“The software allows us to maximise the marketing potential of email communications. Many businesses still overlook the power of the email as a communication tool even though it offers huge opportunities to show off a company’s brand and be creative in the way you communicate with customers and prospects.

“Using mailPrimer, we can present a consistent image of our company’s brand within every email our company sends out, update individual templates and add url links to specific events and promotions or a new service or straight to website.

“By comparison, traditional ‘plain’ emails can often degrade or devalue a company’s brand and image by, for example, featuring half-baked jpg. logo insertions and long clumsy url links.”

He says many companies are now realising that branding is the key to reaching their customers and building their business. mailPrimer offers a leading edge, cost-effective and highly customisable solution to promote a brand and at the same time improve customer services.

“It keeps us one step ahead in terms of our company’s mission to deliver excellence in service.

“At the end of the day, mailPrimer has shown us the time has come for email as a powerful digital marketing tool.”

Business Drivers For mailPrimer Solution

He says the main business driver for the company in using the mailPrimer solution was a need for Brebner Print to brand itself professionally and consistently in its email communications. This was considered a necessity for the company’s overall brand positioning and also because the company is in the business of promoting brand image.

“Our customers and the market that we operate in demanded a higher level of branding communications.

“As Brebner Print likes to keep in the forefront of technological developments we also wanted to see if mailPrimer could improve the level of service we provide in the way we send quotes and estimates to our customers.

“We needed a new format that both staff and customers would welcome and that we could also control from a branding point-of-view.”

Simple Implementation Process Leads To Significant Results

The implementation process involved mailPrimer, Brebner Print’s IT department and its business process service provider, Prism Win, working together.

Basically, the process involved creating new email and quote templates and passing these on to mailPrimer to convert into a html format. Prism Win revised Brebner Print’s business process software to accommodate the new reports that needed to be created.

“The implementation of mailPrimer was simple and has improved our customers experience in a positive way. The ability to file a digital quote on lap top/desk top rather than storing reams of paper is highly agreeable to our customer base; it means instant location and review of the quote.

“Many of our customers receive multiple quotes so actioning or confirming the quote becomes easy as the response can be emailed back with all details to customer service and/or account management simultaneously.

One significant result has been a “notable increase” in the number of customer requests for quotes to be emailed to them.

“I firmly believe that prospective clients and existing clients put huge value in quotes directed via email and as a result used us more for quoting purely on the convenience factor which possible cut down on our competitor level.

“The expectation from the customer was always there for us to email quotes and we were not delivering effectively on this.

“The preference for emailed quotes came directly from our customers and showed us that there were competitors delivering quotes via email but not in a very strategic or professional format.

“Brebner Print did not want to simply fall in line with the norm but reviewed the options and delivered a product that fulfilled our brand requirements and our customer’s needs.”

Measures Of Success

For Brebner Print, the increase in the number of quotes requested by customers and delivered to them via email has been a key measure of the project’s success.

“From a customer’s point-of-view mailPrimer’s has enabled real efficiencies in delivery of estimates, direct to customers from Brebner Print’s estimator’s desk rather than the previously protracted process of printing and faxing of a quote letter”, Steve Wilton-Jones said.

“This has meant our response time to our end-user has increased,” he said. “It has also reduced overheads in paper, toner, telecommunication costs of a fax and the time saved not having staff wandering to a fax across the other side of the office.”

While return on investment has not been measured specifically, Brebner Print believes the savings from improved productivity, material and operational cost reductions far outweigh the initial investment and ongoing costs of the mailPrimer service.

The other major return has been the impact the new system has had, and will continue to have, on raising awareness about the company’s brand.

Next Steps…

Steve Wilton-Jones says the project has proved so successful mailPrimer has been implemented in three of Brebner Print’s sister companies in the Pacific Print Group.

“Brebner Print will now be working towards implementing mailPrimer software into more of our companies as they are assimilated into the Prism Win network that we operate on.”