Rather than invest in this package outright, printers can now apparently pay as little as a few hundred pounds, depending on the number of campaigns the software is used for. Flyte director Marian Stefani explained that this enables printers to test appetite for variable data campaigns, marketing analytics, web-to-print and cross-media offerings, before making a significant investment.
"The barriers to printers getting into the cross-media space currently are their customers not understanding this offering, not understanding the ROI they could get, believing it will be too costly or it just not even occurring to customers to ask their printer if they could help with this. The main barrier is that clients also often don’t trust their printer to do this," she said. "But this SAAMS service allows printers to go to customers and say ‘well let’s just try it'."
Stefani added that MCM’s aim was not only to offer cheaper initial access to the technology, but also to offer strong support to printers in rolling out a cross-media offering.
She said: "We can go into a printers and not only support the technology but the approach to clients as well. We can take away all of the barriers which stop printers doing this, including the sale and going right through to the IT and management of it. We can help at all levels then gradually hand back to the printers."
XMPie has been happy to partner with MCM on this in view of making more sales of ownership of the XMPie package in future.
Stefani said: "XMPie has been incredibly supportive. They’ve been happy to work with us because each SAAMS might turn into a sale outright. And they want to make the product more successful and well known."
But MCM’s SAAMS offering is also designed for indefinite use by those for whom the cost of XMPie ownership is too high, qualified Stefani. She said: "Buying the system is often prohibitively expensive to the printer. It can cost tens of thousands to get a system of equivalent power to what we can offer as SAAMS. But this way they can use it for as a little as a few hundred pounds up to several thousand."
Users of this SAAMS XMPie will interact with a platform branded as ‘Multi Channel Machine powered by XMPie’.
MCM currently has six Multi Channel Machine customers, and reported high interest at Cross Media 2013 last week, where the offering was officially launched.
