Spring is nearly here, the nights are getting lighter and daffodils starting to emerge & its time for spring cleaning.

I guess it would also be a good time of any customers with membership schemes to have a spring clean as well, a few tips would be to:

have a look at existing membership cards to see if they need an update
you could run a member competition for them to design the new cards and offer a prize, this is a great way to make members feel included and help if you are struggling with design ideas
alternatively you could take a look at our card examples page www.cardexamples.co.uk for inspiration
you could consider implementing a tracking system to monitor member activity which could provide vital information to a club in terms of retention and member movement (barcodes or magnetic strips could help you with this)
depending on when your membership year runs it may be time to ask member if they are renewing, bear in mind that people are still struggling financially so you may want to consider incentives such as renew for 12 months and get one month free or a free gift.

If any readers of this have any further ideas for fellow organisations please feel free to add them to this blog.

Bye for now.

A full colour plastic card

We produce plastic cards that have various optional extras.

The picture below is taken from our website which illustrates the various options available.

We are going to update our website shortly to include information about each extra as we have found that customers are often confused on ‘how they work’ often we get ask how a signature strip works.

We hope to make these updates within the next few weeks.

Optional extras available on our full colour plastic cards

Hi All,

I am sure you are aware of our bureau personlisation service by now. Just in case you are not this service is where we print the base card/design and hold them in our bureau office for you to call off with new membership details when you require them. For more information please take a look at the new webpages at - http://www.cpcards.co.uk/personalisation.html

Well, I just wanted to let you know that the webpages for this service have been updated.

We hope that you find them a lot easier to navigate and understand now.

However if you feel anything is not clear or if you just have a general enquiry regarding the bureau personalization service just let us know.

The bureau personalisation service really is a great way to ensure you members feel valued and appreciated.

Bye for now

Examples of bureau personalisation

For our full colour plastic cards, we offer a bureau personalisation service.

This service enables customers to have plastic cards personalised with customers/members details as and when required.

So, for example, a golf club could order 1,000 plastic membership cards. We would hold the plastic cards in stock for them once they have been printed. Then maybe once a week, the customer will email an excel document to us which contains the details to be printed on the cards of the new members, for example:

- The members name

- The type of membership, full, junior etc.

- The members membership number

- The expiry date.

Once we have received the customers excel file, we will overprint the personalised details onto the cards and dispatch them within 3 working days.

This service is also useful if a member loses their card, their details can be submitted to us as normal when new cards are ordered.

Recently the technical guys here noticed a lot of potential customers were coming to our website home page from Google using keywords such as membership cards or membership card printing but the ‘bounce rate’ was quite high.

This means that potential customers come to our website via the home page but they do not proceed any further to have a look around the website.

So today, our home page has been slightly revamped to be easier on the eye and more to the point about the types of plastic cards that we produce.

Only time will tell how successful this improvement will be.

It has been my colleagues jobs to look through the order history for our bureau personlisation jobs recently (this is where we print the base artwork onto a full colour solid plastic cards and hold them in stock for customer to call off when new members join).

It is amazing that we have quite a number of customers who have plastic cards in stock yet have not called them off from there stock for over 12 months,

We have decided to politely enquiry as to whether they still need them as unfortunately our storage space is not endless.

If the cards are no longer require we will securely destroy them.

Alternatively if they are still require we will hold them for a further 6 months. If they are not required within this time we will contact the customer again and ask if they requirement them destroying or posting to them.

I do not envy my colleague having this job as it is quite time consuming!

Hello All,

I hope you have all had time to recuperate over the Easter weekend and are ready to order your plastic cards.

A lot of customers have realized that there membership / loyalty schemes are really taking off and more cards are required urgently.

If you have ordered membership or loyalty cards with us earlier this year it may be time to double check your stock and re-order more plastic cards if required. Why leave it to the last minute and potential upset new members or customer as you do not have cards available for them.

On a final point, we all have the May bank holidays to look forward to  :-)

Recently one of our long term repeat customers found ‘cheaper’ plastic cards from one of our competitors and because of the lower prices they had to order plastic cards from them so they could pass the saving onto their client.

However, today this customer returned to us and said the following:

Today we have been very busy with rush orders and we anticipate we will also receive a lot of rush plastic card orders this week. However, because of the Easter bank holiday weekend we are losing 2 working days (Friday and Monday) so this does not help us or the customers with a fast turnaround for those orders that are needed ‘yesterday’

However, as usual, if you have a rush order, email your artwork and details to us and we will see how we can help you.

To assist with the hassle that the Easter bank holiday causes, we are advising customers whose orders are being dispatched on Thursday to be delivered on Saturday AM, unfortunately, this does cost extra but will help to ensure that the customers plastic card order is delivered on Saturday AM rather than on Tuesday the following week.

We always offer postal proofs with every full colour solid plastic cards order. There are numerous reasons why we offer them. Basically the cards when printed and finalized may come out differently than expected. Reasons include:

-  Orders with magnetic strips need to be tested to ensure they work ok before the full order is printed. Occasionally the proofing stage can highlight problems before the full order is printed.
-  The above also applies for barcodes.
-  Colours can come out differently then expected when the artwork is printed on to plastic cards.
-  A printed proof may highlight any areas of the artwork which have been provided by the customer as proof quality/low resolution. The customer can then decide if they have the ability to provide the artwork in a better quality.
-  Optional extras such as embossing can be applied to show the final result, sometimes embossing may cover key text which the customer has not realised previously.

The above are example but highlight the obvious reasons for producing postal proofs.

Most plastic cards companies, often those shipping the cards into the UK from the far East, do not offer postal proof I think this is basically because it would take far to long to ship a sample card with the customer artwork on to the UK. Please bear this in mind when ordering cards from a company who does not produce the cards in the UK. Imagine if your full order arrived and it looked terrible or the magnetic strips did not work, I doubt anything could be done.

However, it may not be obvious that some companies are not producing the cards in the UK, i.e. their sales office may be here in the UK, so you need to ask them if the cards are produced here in the UK or if they are shipped in from the far east etc.
Place your order with us and receive your postal proof before we print your full order. This is to ensure full review and testing of any optional extras can occur before you commit to your full order being printed.