Author: Ben

Many businesses use the postage service every day to send out invoices, reminders and promotional material to their customers. Direct mailing can help you increase your business and quickly convert to new sales. Postage costs can be reduced if you are sending out mass mailings but there are still ways that you can save money even if you are only sending out less than fifty letters or flyers.

A franking machine can easily be installed in most offices and allows you to print the postage directly. You can often add your own logo too, to personalise the mail that is going out to customers.

Franking machines offer Royal Mail postage discounts. The integrated weighing scales built in to a franking machine means that it can automatically calculate the exact postage that needs to be applied to the letter or parcel being sent out. This alone can save a business on average over twenty percent on their postage costs per week.

Direct mailing companies often offer packages that allow them to quote you a set price for the design, printing and mailing. If you have in house designers or want to use a third party designer then many mailing companies will print from a PDF that you send them.

Often you will find that mailing companies can offer a postage service that is cheaper than you posting them yourself. For example, some companies charge 23-24p per postcard sent out and that includes printing. That price is actually less than a second class stamp. They are able to offer these prices due to discounts they receive in bulk purchases.

If you are going to use your own designers, then be sure to proof read your flyer / letter a number of times before sending it to the mailing house to print as they will not be held responsible for errors made within a design that they have not created.

Postages costs can be extremely expensive especially if it for delivery of something large or heavy. When looking to buy anything online which will require postage, always check to find out the delivery price. Often products are advertised at a reasonably low price but then the postage charges are extremely high meaning overall you pay more than you should.

Some companies will offer combined postage if you are buying multiple items from them, but be sure to check this prior to placing your order as often this needs to be done before committing to buy.

If you are buying through an auction site such as eBay, then it is vital to check the delivery details. It may be that the person selling the item has listed it as collection only or that you are required to sort out your own courier for delivery. If the postage seems high, you could obtain your own quote from a courier and often to arrange the delivery yourself.

Direct mailing in a process which involves contacting a specific group of people or businesses and sending them information that is targeted to them based on information you have gathered. This may include email marketing, text message marketing, phone calls as well as sending out brochures or emails.

Most major organisations already know the advantages of using direct mailing and have stated that it is their most effective form of marketing. Although direct marketing can be expensive, the benefits far out weight the cost.

Being able to send customers information that is specifically relevant to them will increase your chances of making a sale. It can actually bring down the cost of email marketing, for example, as rather than sending out 10,000 emails you may be able to only send out 2,000 emails and still get the same response rate. Direct marketing is often easy to track the results of, especially in the case of email marketing where you can usually check the delivery, open rate and click throughs as well as finding out what most people clicked on within the email.

When buying an item online you may look at the delivery options to see which one suits your needs. Many companies offer a next day delivery service and recently some have even started offering same day delivery! If the item is being sent by royal mail post then it is usually recorded, tracked, 1st class or 2nd class. Recorded delivery is not guaranteed for the next day (many people get this confused), it just means that someone will need to sign for the item. Tracked items are usually delivered the next working day and you can chose if you need it delivered before a certain time. 1st class is often 1 -2 working days in the UK and second class 2- 4 working days. This said, apart from the tracked service none of the others are guaranteed, so you could be waiting weeks for that parcel to arrive. The post office will not investigate a missing letter or parcel until after 28 days and even then, if it has no tracking number it will be very hard for them to find out where it has gone.

So is it worth paying for faster delivery? Only really if it is guaranteed.