Effective business communication is the key to maintaining positive and profitable relationships with customers and clients. Whether you use traditional print for direct mail campaigns or remain strictly digital, there is always room for improvements and optimisations you can make with your outbound mail solutions.

A Return to Direct Mail

With an overflow of email marketing items and newsletters clogging up the inbox of billions of subscribers around the world, it’s easy to see how your email could get lost in a sea of unmemorable messages. According to research 78% of people opt out of an email list because they were receiving too many emails.

A direct mail campaign can shake things up a bit by differentiating you from the competition. While direct mail is considered by many to be a primarily outbound marketing technique, it can work well if you target the right demographic, such as an older generation. However, direct mail may not be the most efficient solution when targeting a generation which considers their smartphone to be an essential hub for all communications.

The key to a successful direct mail campaign is to personalise the message as much as possible, and we’re not talking about just having a name on the envelope. Use your customer data such as their shopping habits, hobbies, and interests to create a message that will speak directly to them. One example which is often used to good effect is a customer’s birthday. You could offer a discount during the week of their birthday to make them feel truly valued as a customer.

Clean Up Your Internal Mail Service

Keeping internal mail organised can be a time consuming and unrewarding task, but there are a few things you can do to automate and fine-tune the process.
Tidy up the address list – Mail returned because of wrong addresses can add up to a lot of wasted time and resources, as can duplicate addresses. A clean and tidy list will help keep these mistakes to a minimum.

Receive mailing requests centrally – You will free up a lot of time when you eliminate the need to organise mailing jobs in batches manually.
Use a third party validation process – You can prevent a lot of costly errors by using a validation process that ensures each envelope going out contains the right document.

Improve Document Production

Mailings may be phasing out, but they still take up vast amounts of many organisations’ resources. Spending the time to optimise these outbound mail services, such as automating the document production process, has the potential to free up a considerable amount of time.

Improve The Reliability Of Mailings And Printings

Returned mail because of an incomplete or wrong address, or documents being inserted into the wrong envelope is a costly expense most businesses would prefer to avoid. It’s a problem you can eliminate with some fine tuning and automation of the error checking process, such as verifying that recipient and address fields are always filled in.

Increase Savings Through Centralisation

Business communication could be more efficient and cost effective if organisations examined the systems they could use to centralise many of their outbound mail processes. It’s the small day-to-day print and mail jobs which all add up over time.

Consider all the ad-hoc jobs such as contracts, claim letters, welcome letters and the numerous reminders which get printed and sent every day. With so many different departments throughout an organisation all handling their print and mailing jobs, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to monitor efficiency and track costs. Centralising all day-to-day printing and mailings will streamline the process, reduce the number of laborious tasks required, and eliminate the cost of post meters.