My most recent posts have talked about the importance of content, personalisation and making it relevant and then how to get the message out there. 
Many businesses consider mailing out letters outdated and unnecessary when it’s easy to email.
But wait a minute…
There are many businesses that have a need to print and mail customer letters, marketing information, legal documents, insurance renewals, bills and invoices even though they use email for the large majority.
The problem is many of your customers might be happy to receive emails but there are always letters that need to be mailed.
How do you manage those pesky few each month?
The print industry has come in for some pretty heavy criticism for not being forward thinking and innovative.
One of its more recent innovations is hybrid mail from the standard print and mail distribution via outsourcing data to a third party and having it printed and mailed to manage your mailings from your desktop at a touch of a button.
Hybrid mail has been around since the 70s and has come to the fore in the last 3-5 years. Whilst there are many large hybrid mail providers in the UK market place, most of their services are designed for the big corporate user and don’t always have the SME in mind.
A significant benefit of hybrid mail is the time it takes to create a mailing, minimal effort, cost-effective printing and mailing out letters from even a few, to thousands of letters.
How does it work?
Hybrid mail fuses electronic and traditional mailing processes. Whatever documents you want to print there is minimal time needed to get them printed and mailed. The process goes something like this:
- Upload the document you want to print
- Preview your pages
- Check your recipients
- Order – choose either black and white or colour print, first or second class delivery
You need a hybrid mail service provider who can securely print and mail your letters and a PC/laptop.
Hybrid mail works by enabling users to send individual or multiple page letters and documents created on any computer to a central print site via the internet.
The letters are printed, merged with letters that the hybrid mail provider has produced for other customers that day and sorted into mailsort order ready for posting.
It helps to understand how the system works so you can think about how the service can be used to benefit your organisation and business.
With ongoing requirements even for small mailings, hybrid mail delivers a great service less than the cost of a second class stamp.
How does hybrid mail add value to your business?
Any organisation that is printing and sending letters using a desktop printer will save time and money switching to hybrid mail.
Even organisations with larger in-house operations or using third party suppliers such as print and mailing houses to print their statements, invoices, customer letters, subscription renewals can save money.
Hybrid mail is not a complicated process. Unlike print and mailing services the cost is not based on the volume being mailed. Whether you send out one bespoke letter to one recipient or 500 letters to 500 recipients the unit cost is the same.
Some hybrid mail services will offer added value in the form of correcting inaccuracies in customer addresses free of charge through integration with the postal address file. [PAF]
Standardising your letterhead and corporate identity across your hard copy communications will enable you to ensure brand consistency without having to pay for re-design costs.
Some hybrid mail services allow you to set, limit and control spending at an individual user or departmental level which means you have full control over what gets mailed out and how much it costs.
One of the major benefits of hybrid mail is the reduction in your organisation’s carbon footprint.
Letters are printed on presses that are more energy-efficient than a desktop printer on a per-unit basis.
Bulk mailings cost less to transport and deliver across the country.
Quality, security and reliability are issues that users of the service may have concerns about.
Our Print-2-Mail service run on https the same protocol as the banks and your letters are printed in a production facility that is ISO27001 and GDPR accredited.
The reliability of hybrid mail compares favourably to a standard mailing service and is cheaper. A validation process monitors the number of letters in each mailing to ensure 100% that each letter has been printed and mailed.
Can I use hybrid mail for multi-channel marketing?
Hybrid mail helps reinforce your online brand by sending out a follow-up message using direct mail.
It’s cheap, easy to set up fits in with your online content marketing. It’s a great way to push the same message more than once. Why not promote that event or special promotion numerous times through the mail.
The chances are you are promoting your message online many times but your audience isn’t always online, backing it up with a mailed promotional piece reinforces the online content.
Using traditional and digital marketing approaches simultaneously maximises the reach of your message.
Business-critical documents need not be the burden of your organisation any longer. You won’t need to have your accounts personnel stuffing envelopes nor will you need a franking machine.
All you have to do is upload a data file to our portal, and we do the rest
Even if it’s a few hundred letters each month, hybrid mail will work for you, saving time, effort and money.
