Category: Mailing

Before the days of the internet, the majority of companies marketing was done by paper mail outs and door to door sales people. Paper mail outs could end up being very costly and you not seeing much of a return. One of the biggest issues with print work is making sure that it is all one hundred percent correct before it is printed as unfortunately unlike online publications, you normally will have to pay for the whole job to be corrected and printed again or risk sending something out that contains mistakes.

Door to door sales people can also be expensive. You may have two or three field agents out a few days a week and only generate one sale containing a small profit. Once you have taken in to account the salary that you are paying the members of staff, you will probably have lost on the deal.

Despite this, many companies still do mail outs and this does seem to still work quite well for the retail industry as it allows people to see a sample of products available or a sales promotion that is approaching.

You will probably of now heard about the phrase “paperless” in terms of information you receive from a company. This may refer to newsletters, invoices and other documents hat previously you would have received in the post. The term paperless means to stop receiving the above in the form of a letter through the post and instead to either receive an email with the documents attached or sometimes allowing you to login to a client area to either view or download the documents yourself.

The main idea of this new mailing system is to not only have a positive impact on the environment by less paper and other consumables being used but to also save the company money. Very often many of the companies that offer paperless billing will pass on a small saving to you to. The downside is that should you need a hard copy of a document you may either need to print it yourself or pay a fee to the company to get a copy of it.

There are a few ways of sending out mass emails to customers or potential customers. In my experience, buying lists of “opted in” email addresses very often has poor or no results and can actually end of having a negative effect as people can be annoyed that you have contacted them. Also many companies will not allow you to send emails through their servers if you have not got permission directly from the recipient (gathered the information yourself).

The way to get great results is to only contact people that have requested information or you have direct authority to contact.

When creating the email to send, it may be nice to add their name to it so that they feel it is a little more personal. Make sure that the email you are sending out is going to be of interest, often adding a special offer or discount code works well. It is illegal to send out any marketing emails to anyone without having a “unsubscribe” option within it which will remove them from future emails.

Try not to use words like free and to add too many links to external sites as these are often indicators of spam and may get blocked by many of the recipients email filters.

Many companies are now choosing to email their customers information, advertising and account queries and bills. This is saving the business world millions of pounds every year in terms of postage and even admin time.

Some of these companies are passing some of the savings on to their customers, offering them discounts for receiving their bills via paperless means. This is a great way to attract customers to sign up for this service.

You should first carry out some research as to how your customers would feel if you starting communicating with them via emails rather than letters. If you decide to go down the email route you should always allow people to be able to receive information in another way e.g. in the post as not everyone has access to the internet. Some companies no charge customers to receive paper bills but offer a free service to view / print your bills online.

For many of us it is not unusual to receive 20 or 30 emails per day, often even up to a hundred. When this happens it is easy for your email inbox to get out of control and important emails often get missed.

I always recommend that people set up rules and filters on their inbox to file certain emails that maybe they do not need to read. For example, if you are responsible for creating post on your website and get a new email every time one is posted, you may want to keep the email but do not actually need to read it at that time. In this case I would suggest opening up your email program and creating a rule whereby any email that contains the subject “post from website” for example automatically gets filed in a new folder you have created. Be aware that if you use the filters incorrectly you may find that all emails from a particular sender get sent to the specified folder.