Hello,

This is a polite request to re-sellers of our full colour solid plastic cards and key cards,

Over the past month we have a lot of re-sellers contacting us after seeing the postal proof for the full colour solid plastic cards, various queries / comments have been made regarding the printing. We have spent a lot of time explaining printing limitations, printing process, CMYK colour values etc and why certain things have happened (usually down to the artwork supplied).

After we have spent a long, long time discussing the points with the re-seller they have then show the end customer the postal proof, who 9 out of 10 times approves the proof immediately and thinks they are wonderful.

Please could I politely request that the postal proof is shown to the customer before contacting us with concerns as often we find that they are being over analysed and the end customer is 100% happy with it.

Any comments please feel free to post on this blog.

Hi All,

Just in case you didn’t realise today is the longest day otherwise known as summer solstice. What a great excuse to get the BBQ out tonight. We have had a couple of request this year for summer solstic party invites, not something we have had before.

Maybe its a new craze! or just another excuse for a party, not that one is required!

The plastic cards designs for these invites were submitted to us by the party holders, they opted for the frosted clear plastic cards, not very surprisingly with an image of a sun on them! We suggested printing these with the holofoil which gives a rainbow effect in when the cards is viewed at different angles and the customers agreed that this was a great idea.

The finished products look really good, if I get change I will pop a photo on the blog at a later date.

Bye for now and happy summer solstic.

Hello All,

The blog is more of an announcement, as you are probably aware we offer a bureau personlisation service where we hold the plastic cards is stock and personlise them for the customer when new members join.

We are having a tidy up of the office store this week and next week and will be contacting customers who have not asked for any of there cards for 12 months or over. We will ask the customer if they would like any remaining cards to be posted to them or for us to destroy them.

We have had to make a decision that if a customer has not been in contact or submitted any excel files in the last 12 months that we will have to shred the cards.
In addition to this, if we receive email delivery failures and again the customer has not been in touch for 12 months or longer we will shred the cards.
If you think you have any cards sat in our stores please get in touch in the next week as we will happily post them out to you.

Bye for now.

Hi All,

I hope you are all preparing for the cooler weather and stocking up on winter essentials.

We have had a lot of enquiries for New years eve and Christmas party plastic cards recently, advance planning or what! I am not knocking advance planning at all and wish more customers would do this!

Our frosted plastic cards and satin black plastic cards are the most popular for party invites as they give a dramatic look. Most customer keep some in there wallets to hand out to friends they bump in to whilst out and about doing there shopping etc.

Do you have an event / party in the next couple of months? If so have a think about the kind of invites you wish to send out and give a though to our frosted / satin black plastic cards.

Bye for now.

Hi All,

Its been a manic few weeks, mainly due to a lot of colleges and universities starting the academic term and needing cards associated with this.

We can finally breath again and have some room for express orders should you need any cards in a hurry.

Obviously the timescale we can manage will depend on your requirements e.g. 8000 plastic cards with holes for 3 working days time will be a problem! But shorter runs of up to 1000 full colour solid plastic cards with no extras or just with sequential numbering, we should be able to turn round relatively quickly.

Drop us an email if you need any full colour solid plastic cards quickly sales@cpcards.co.uk and we will see what we can do to help you.

We received an email today for our frosted plastic cards to be used as birthday invites, see below:

“I wanted something different for a birthday invitation and stumbled across you website and i love the frosted plastic cards and was thinking i could use them as tickets and invitations into my venue i think i will need around 300 with pink writing please. I was also wondering if you are able to put some kind of flower design with a sixteen on it somewhere, if that is possible. please could you get back to me a soon as possible, with how long they take to make? and also if you are able to design what i requested please could you email me it before i make my purchase. my party is on the 26th of next month so i will need them asap.”

We emailed back with a price and said that we can help with the design, we just need a small deposit to start work.

This is a prime example of the kind of enquiry we get for invitations and we hope we can help out.

Bye for now

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 on our website 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.

Hi All,

We have a customer at the moment who submitted terrible artwork for the full colour cards, he received his postal proof and was not happy with a number of things. My colleague very kindly agreed to wrestle with this artwork, free of charge and sent a photo-realistic proof over by email for him to approve prior to production of his 2nd postal proof.

He approved this email proof so we started production on the 2nd postal proof however the very next day the customer contacts us saying there is a typing mistake which our spell check department had not picked it up. My colleague was a little upset by this as it had taken him a long time to sort this customers artwork out and obviously he did not even bother to check the email proof properly. We do not have a spell check department, as a lot of our customers provide there own artwork (as this customer did!).

We are currently in the process of stopping production of the 2nd postal proof and yet again for no cost changing the customers own artwork.

I am not sure what the moral of this story should be, it could be for us not to fix customers artwork, make customers wait for 24 hours to approve an email proof, don’t bother at all the email proofs as they are not checked properly! Or should we just put this down as experience and try to to taint every customer with the same brush. Personally I think the latter is the best option however it is difficult!

Please please please, if you are placing an order with us, could you double and triple check all email proofs before approving them. Thank you!

Bye for now

Hello,

Wanted to post a quick blog to remind you all that our special offer for 100 or 200 full colour solid plastic cards are still available.

The offer is very cost effective especially as it is applicable to our thickness solid plastic card which is 760 microns in thickness.

You can order the thinner 420 micron if you want however there is no price difference, a lot of customer have ordered the 760 micron as they give a more professional image to the end user (even after initially enquiring about the 420 micron or the 680 micron come to think).

I can confirm that we will honour this offer until at least the end of May however no guarantees after this date.

Bye for now

Hi All,

A taxi company placed an order with us today for priority cards, when I spoke to the customer on the phone she mentioned that the cards are being used to try and get some more business in as the recession seems to now be affecting them.

We deal with various different membership, loyalty, discount cards etc day in day out so have a lot of experience in this area. I agreed with the lady I spoke to, we have found a lot of people not only ordering these cards not re-ordering them at a later date which shows that there is a benefit to them.

It is such a good idea to to use our full colour solid plastic cards to try and promote a business, offering a small discount or VIP perks really does member a member or in the above case customer feel valued.

Bye for now