Whether your business relies on mail for communications, sales, marketing, or a mix of different activities, sending out mail can be a tedious and resource-intensive process. In spite of the value that mail offers to a wide range of your business activities, sending out this mail involves packaging letters and other deliverables, addressing them, and visiting a local post office to pay for postage and mail off those items.
If you’re sending mail every day, or even several times a week, this process can create direct and indirect costs that are unsustainable for your business. Thanks to business postage meters, they’re also unnecessary.
For businesses struggling with the costs and complexity of sending out regular business mail, an office postage machine can be a worthwhile investment that takes the stress out of mailing and improves your resource management. Unfamiliar with the benefits of your own postage meter for small business mail? Here are five big advantages any business can appreciate.
1. Reduce the Time You Spent Running to the Post Office
When your business sends mail that needs to be weighed for proper postage, this single article of mail requires its own trip to the post office. Over time, these visits become a drain on your business resources, requiring one of your office staff to personally visit the post office during working hours to ensure proper postage.
If you don’t want to make this trip, your business will likely end up overpaying on postage just to make sure the piece of mail doesn’t get returned or go missing. But a postage meter spares you of this headache, giving you a scale to take care of this simple task on your own—and from the comfort of your office. With a meter and a postage printer at your disposal, you can continue sending business mail while cutting out the vast majority of your visits to the post office.
2. Save Money on Business Postage
Inaccurate business postage—including excessive postage slapped on mail to ensure its safe delivery—creates an unnecessary cost for your business to pay. While the cost per piece of mail may only add up to a few cents each, the accumulative cost of overpayment can be significant for businesses sending hundreds or even thousands of pieces of mail every month.
In addition to more accurate postage, the United States Postal Service currently offers five
A postage meter offers precise weight measurements to calculate exactly the right amount of postage per item. While your business can save on the cost of sending someone down to the local post office to purchase this postage, your business can compound its savings by ensuring a fair price for each piece of mail.
3. Reduce Time and Labor Spent Folding Envelopes
Postage meters are often just one part of a larger digital mailing system. Many meters can be combined with a folding machine that folds envelopes for you, reducing the manual labor involved in preparing business mail for postage and delivery.
These letter-folding machines can be set up in your office with only a modest space investment, making it easy to justify adoption of this time-saving solution. In some cases, the elimination of this manual task may even motivate your business to increase its investments into mailed sales and marketing.
4. Customize Packaging With Promotional Branding
As part of a digital mailing system, an office postage meter can help you improve your branding and messaging on mailed items by printing logos, slogans and other graphics onto each envelope.
These custom printing capabilities also let you print return addresses onto envelopes, resulting in fast and easy customizations that support your company’s branding while further reducing the time investment required for business mail activities.
5. Postage Meter Machines Improve Your Customer Experience
When your business is able to print postage from the office, it helps you be more responsive to correspondence and other communications sent through the mail. This ultimately turns your business mail strategy into a more responsive channel for engaging with business partners as well as your clients.
Whether you’re sending out important business updates, promotional offers or sales materials, faster mailing can make a big difference for your customer base—especially compared to the instant gratification of communication delivered through digital channels. While there’s value in creating a branded experience that gives customers the reward of receiving mail at their home or office, your business shouldn’t try to test the patience of those customers.
With postage meters available in-house, your business can prep mail and get it out for delivery that very same day. Your mail recipients will be grateful for the prompt service.
Ready to take advantage of all the benefits an office postage meter can offer? Contact an office systems provider today to get set up with a meter of your own.