4 ways to help you save time & money on outgoing mail
Escalating postage rates can quickly erode your budget, especially during high-volume mailing periods. Without careful management, expenses can exceed the value of your mailings. In this article, we will go over some useful ways you can help reduce your mailing costs, all while delivering exceptional mail to your target audience.
Investing in an in-house Postage Meter
Postage Meters and mailing systems ensure you get the postage right the first time as well as reducing trips to the post office. Thanks to Intelligent Mail Indicia or IMI technology, you eliminate the risk of overpaying by connecting to the USPS, so you always have the latest rates.
Additionally, Postage Meters will save you as much as 5% compared to traditional stamps. If your machine is also USPS approved, your business may qualify for commercial base pricing discounts on top of this. These in-house mail systems also offer tracking capabilities, so your business can delegate costs to departments or specific tasks.
Automate your Mailing Workflow
Especially as your business grows, automating your mail workflow will be a critical step to ensuring not only fast mail processing, but mail that is free of human error. There are many tools and machines that can create good accurate mail fairly quickly for very low cost. Take for example the Folder Inserter. These machines are designed to get the mail folded, sorted, and inserted quickly, while maintaining accuracy and consistency. Think how many employees would be needed to fold all your mail and place it into appropriate packages. With a folder inserter, you can not only free up employees to do other tasks, but you significantly reduce the time it takes for the mail to be processed.
Automating your mail is not only efficient, but it provides consistent workflow. When paired with a managed service provider, your company not only can get amazing cost-effective leasing deals for otherwise expensive equipment. But you will get experts, and routine maintenance support that helps to greatly minimize workflow disruption and ensure your business has these machines running to the best of their performance consistently. Allowing your company to save time, keep costs low, and ensure a consistent workflow.
Staying up to date on Addresses
It is extremely important that you have the latest address for any business or customer you send out mail to. Having mail returned to your business is detrimental as not only does the money you pay go down the drain, but the time you spend as well. Businesses are constantly growing, especially in this rapid industry. Because of that it can be very common that businesses move locations to better fit this accommodation.
There are several key ideas you can implement that will help make the process of having up to date addresses. The first is having an address verification system that can help ensure shipping addresses are still valid. This can give immediate notice to if something within the business you are sending mail to has changed. Additionally, having employees who can regularly use your company database and provide routine support can also be a plus to ensure full accuracy of your shipping addresses.
Implement Mailing and Shipping Software
You can stay ahead of your competition and get access to valuable statistics and tracking capabilities when you invest in mail and shipping software. The best part is this can be easily integrated into your postage meter and mailing systems. S.M.A.R.T mailroom software for example comes with a wealth of features such as advanced tracking and bulk shipping which can assist in your business saving money and heavily reducing expenses.
Additionally, mail software such as S.M.A.R.T is fully compliant and will automatically help in identifying the lowest cost or fastest delivery method for processing parcels. It also makes accounting significantly easier, by supporting total postage reconciliation and assists with chargeback accounting. Which can be helpful for billing customers or departments mail and shipping costs that would otherwise go unaccounted for.
Mailing is an important part of business, there can be so many moving parts to how best your company can optimize an ideal mailing workflow that can work and adjust to your business environment. Summit Technology is here to help and will offer a free no obligation assessment, where our experts will do a deep analysis of your office and mailing environment to determine what options could work best for your business.