Christmas brings a whole variety of valid reason to ‘contact your prospective customers’ and promote your business. Jere are some simple ways to contact your customer or prospect in a non-spammy way.

1. Send a Christmas Card to your prospect – better yet, make sure that the Christmas Card is professional looking with your brand being strongly re-inforced. Have a look at the pre-designed Christmas Card Templates on our PrintBuyingDirect website for a good starting point on how to achieve this.
2. Want to re-inforce your brand all year long? Send a Wall Planner – people love these, each year we have more people call us to make sure we don’t forget to send them a WallPlanner. It’s surprising the uses your prospective customers will find for them, holiday planning, shift patterns, close downs etc. So send some branded Wall Planners with your contact details and company website on, you’ll be surprised at the response; To find out more and get you started with some pre-designed wallplanner templates have a look at our website.
3. Another way to keep your brand in front of your customers all year round is to create a Company Calendar and send it to selected customers and prospects, I say ‘selected’ only because calendars tend to be more pricey than Wall Planners, so save them for your warmest prospects and higher spending customers. CD Calendars are great as they stay on someones desk all year, or wall planners to be visible to the entire office. You can find CD Calendar Templates or Wall Calendar Templates to try on our website.

So as you can see, Christmas presents a wealth of opportunities to market your business.

• Leaflets & Flyers are not subject to VAT – unless they contain a significant area intended for the user to complete (for example, a reply form). Generally speaking if the area of the form is less than 25% of the surface area of the leaflet then VAT doesn’t apply.
• Brochures and Catalogues again are not subject to VAT unless they have a flap or pocket – they then become presentation folders (see below)
• Presentation folders are Vatable, unless they are not primarily designed to hold other items and convey information. I would interpret this to mean that a multi-page brochure with a pocket on the back cover would be exempt from VAT. But a 4pp Folder with a pocket would be primarily designed to hold items and so would be liable to VAT.
• Posters are standard rated for VAT, this is very clear in the HMRC guidelines.
• Booklets fall into the same category as Brochures – please see point above.
• Books are zero rated for VAT, this includes school books (even though they may have areas to complete), but diaries or any items that are in fact stationery are standard rated – see below.
• Stationery items such as letterheads, compliment slips, notepads, invoices, delivery notes etc are standard rated.
• This time of year a common question revolves around wall planners & calendars, ALL calendars are standard rated.
• Greetings cards and Christmas Cards (even when used for business promotional purposes) are standard rated.
• Large items of print, such as Outdoor Banners, Pull Up Banners and Exhibition Graphics are all subject to VAT

I hope this guide clears up some of the most common questions that we get on VAT & printed matter. If you have any questions please use the contact form on our website.

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Regards

Peter Harrison – www.printbuyingdirect.co.uk - The Printing House Ltd, Crewe, Cheshire, UK, CW2 8UY