Money savings tips for postage

1 Reduce the size of your mailpiece. The Royal Mail introduced Pricing in Proportion back in 2006. Postage is now charged by size as well as by weight. A4 items now cost considerably more than A5 sized items. The impact of the changes is less severe for business mail than bulk mail and in many cases postage costs have been reduced. However, reformatting brochures, magazines and newsletters can lead to savings of up to 20%.

2 Sort your outgoing mail. Royal Mail's Mailsort and Clean Mail products enable mailers to pre sort outgoing mail and receive sizeable discounts to reflect the sharing of the work. You can handle the sortation in house but many organisations choose to outsource this. Responsible Mailing, a mailing house in Preston, is accredited for Mailsort and Clean Mail production. In certain cases, you could save up to 50% of your postage bill.

3 Use other mail providers. Following the deregulation of the postal industry, there is now an extensive choice of mail services from new postal operators. These include household names like DHL and TNT but also include smaller regional operators and international specialists. Some operators use downstream access (final mile delivery is by the Royal Mail) while others have end to end services handling the entire mail delivery.

4 Use a slower mail service. Does your mail really need to arrive tomorrow? You can choose one, two, three or seven day services. You could save up to 40% by choosing a slower service. Royal Mail are introducing further discounts for Mailsort 3 mailings from the end of October 2009. Ring us for costings.

5 Target your mail more effectively. Do you really need to mail to everyone on a customer database or could you target an offer better by segmenting that market? This ensures that offers are made relevant to the customer/prospect. An increase in response rate from 2% to 4% effectively means a 50% saving on the cost per sale. Have you looked at whether there are new responsive data sources for your prospect campaigns?

6 Clean your data regularly. You may have produced the most exciting and visual creative, but if your mailing piece is not delivered to the desired recipient, first impressions are bad and your investment in your carefully prepared message will be wasted. Responsible Mailing can remove deceased records, duplicates and goneaways or validate names, addresses and postcodes to improve the quality of your database and reduce your mailing costs. We can audit your data free of charge, which will show you how accurate your data actually is and the costs involved to cleanse it.

7 Outsource your mail fulfilment. Carrying out your own fulfilment can be more expensive than you think and is not the most motivating of tasks to delegate. Mailing houses offer a full range of mailing services including polywrapping, hand packing, machine envelope enclosure and laser/inkjet personalisation. Responsible Mailing offers rapid turnaround (sometimes as little as 24 hours), competitive pricing and most importantly friendly and helpful advice from industry specialists.

Responsible Mailing September 2009

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