We are lousy at driving efficiency from our photocopying service. Close to 70% of sales involving copying are single purchase sales. That is, 70% of the time customers get copying and nothing else.
While the margin on copying is excellent, it is the lack of efficiency for the business which concerns me. Here is a service which 50% of the time involves us helping the customer yet we fail to achieve any up-sell. Worse is that surrounding our copier is no up-sell message. It’s an unbranded bland part of the store.
So, we’re on a mission to change this. We are going to dress our copier area, develop several up-sell strategies and measure the success or otherwise of our efforts. Our mission is to drive appropriate add on sales with our copying customers. We don’t do enough copying to create a whole new counter. Rather, we want to make the existing single copier contribute more valuably to the business.
We are not alone in failing to leverage our copier to its full potential. Most newsagencies I see sales data for show equally inefficient copier sales – 70% and more of sales are copying and nothing else. And in many of these newsagencies, copying is in the top ten sale items every day – so opportunities for growth abound.
Over the next few weeks we will make a series of changes. I’ll report back here on the results.
The photocopier – money maker or essential service that brings traffic in the door? Ours sits somewhere in between – I like to think it is the former, what I know is that it more than pays its way!
We have tried a few things with our copier – we offer a service where customers can email files to us in PDF or Microsoft format – we print off the required copies and the job is ready for pickup whenever the client needs it and whilst the margins aren’t a lot better, it sure attracts volumes of work. We also offer a scan-to-file service where client’s work is scanned in and emailed back to them (one of our clients is an air-brush artist who produces his work drawings in the coffee shop next door, leaves them with us and gets home to find his scanned drawings waiting in his e-mail). With a virtual monopoly on these type of services (until someone else catches on) we are able to be a price setter rather than a price taker (which most normal copying work forces you to be).
The other thing we have done is to position the copier along side “fancy” papers where you can get a premium for the copy by charging extra per page.
We have also chased newsletter work which involves folding for which we are able to charge a reasonable price. We can’t compete on price with the dedicated copy/print shops on large runs (>1000) but we beat them hands down on turnaround time which for most of the retailers we are involved with is a godsend.