- The importance of a clean workflow
- How your business mail impacts your workflow
- Why a business mail service is crucial
- Incorporating your business mail service into your Virtual Office
Q: What is a business mail service? How will a business mail service affect my company’s daily operations and workflows?
A: Business mail services allow business owners to maintain a mailing address for business purposes without requiring a physical office in the same location. Typically, this is an extension of a Virtual Office. The right business mail service will help you create a healthier workflow that translates to continued business growth.
Remote and hybrid workstyles might have existed before the pandemic, but not to any meaningful degree. Less than 6% of American employees utilized remote work before the stay-at-home orders began.
When the transition first began, it was more out of fear and uncertainty than a genuine desire to work remotely.
During the pandemic, most American employees were working remotely out of necessity. As Covid-19 continues to wane, however, countless employees are now working remotely because they want to rather than because they’re required to.
Although some workers, about 25%, are worn out by the digital platforms they use for remote work, the vast majority of workers are relatively unaffected.
In conjunction with the fallout from the Great Resignation and the widespread acceptance of the tools used to work remotely, the transition to remote and hybrid workstyles has created an environment where business owners are allowing workers to work remotely simply because it’s one of the best ways to improve employee retention.
That said, employee retention isn’t the only reason that business owners are exploring the world of digital-first operations. The percentage of online sales per year continues increasing, starting a business is easier than ever, and even existing businesses can pivot to online operations to achieve growth in new markets.
Naturally, these opportunities require an understanding of digital markets and the tools available for your business. One of these tools you’ll need to understand is a business mail service.
Staying on top of your business mail is a great way to ensure you aren’t ever surprised by any sensitive documents or government correspondence. A quality business mail service is the best way to accomplish this.
In this article, we’ll cover the importance of a clean workflow, what a business mail service is and how it impacts your workflow, why a business mail service is crucial, and how your Virtual Office allows you to incorporate your business mail service into your existing operations.
So, if you’re considering using a corporate mail service, read this first before making any lasting decisions.
- The importance of a clean workflow
- How your business mail impacts your workflow
- Why a business mail service is crucial
- Incorporating your business mail service into your Virtual Office
The importance of a clean workflow
The importance of a clean workflow is pretty apparent.
As a business owner, you have an inordinate amount of work you need to do. Every free moment counts because you always have something you could be doing.
In the same vein, your ability to remain focused is paramount to your success. Being interrupted or attempting to multitask can slow you down and make you lose your train of thought.
Even if you’re running a traditional, brick-and-mortar business, it’s necessary to keep things organized and streamlined so you aren’t wasting time with confusing logistics and poor document management.
Many traditional business owners have access to some kind of business email service or business mail center that some more digital companies simply don’t have the same access to.
If you’re operating a satellite location in an attempt to grow your market share, a clean workflow can be the difference between struggling to find new consumers and a robust new customer base.
Read more: Satellite Office: Your Complete Guide
A clean workflow’s importance for wholly digital businesses can’t be understated.
Even with a high-quality Virtual Office, you don’t have an office with endless filing cabinets you can shove documents inside.
Sure, you can carelessly save documents on your computer, but the argument could be made that sifting through pointlessly named documents on your computer is even more difficult than trying to sift through physical documents you’ve left in an office.
Digital businesses move fast, and a slow workflow will lead to losing clients, customers, and in many cases, employees. How can you provide a collaborative and innovative workspace for your workers if you’re struggling with simple logistic tasks that should, by all rights, be automated in the first place?
Regardless of which option is easier to deal with, the point remains that a clean workflow is paramount to how efficient your business is in its daily operations, whether physical, satellite, remote, or otherwise.
More than anything, you want your business to remain focused. A focused business can react to shifts in the market quicker than its competitors and can prepare for economic downturns without being surprised.
In the modern labor market, flexibility is everything. That said, if you aren’t focused enough to use your business’s flexibility, then flexibility doesn’t mean very much.
If you want to grow as quickly as possible, you must be able to work uninterrupted and focus on what matters most. This is why business mail services play such an important role in owning a business.
Anything you can do to make your workday more compact and streamlined should be done, for your sake and your business’s.
How your mail impacts your workflow
Mail forwarding is a must for any small business owner focusing on digital-first operations, via a satellite office or wholly virtual operations.
Your business mail is regularly filled with important and time-sensitive documents. Not having a clear, consistent mail flow can leave you worried and distracted, putting your business at a direct disadvantage against competitors with a straightforward workflow.
Sure, you can use a business-post service that requires you to drive to a physical mailbox to retrieve your mail, but that, too, disrupts your workflow and may be more expensive in the long run, especially when you account for travel costs.
This is why it’s so important to utilize a Virtual Office equipped with the right amenities.
Your Virtual Office should work as a central hub for your company’s operations. Without the right amenities, you’re effectively paying a higher rate for a glorified PO box.
Read more: Virtual Office Services MUST Include These Key Features
Not to mention, picking up mail is another task you have to make mental space for.
You have to think about it and ensure you make frequent trips to the office. This can lead to undue stress, holding you back from bringing your best to your work.
Essentially, your business mail can impact your workflow in the following ways, regardless of whether or not you’re running a virtual, satellite, or in-person business.
- Distractions
- When you aren’t on a set schedule, you’re responsible for keeping up with the daily mail you receive.
- For virtual businesses, this likely entails frequent trips to pick up your mail, detracting from more important tasks.
- For other businesses, these distractions are just as frustrating. How can you focus on the key aspects of your business when you’re worried about picking up your mail, sorting it, and responding to any time-sensitive documents you might’ve missed?
- Disruptions
- Getting into “a groove” is one of the best feelings, regardless of what kind of job is being done. The same goes for you; once you’re in a groove, anything that takes you away from the task at hand only serves to disrupt you.
- Business mail is inherently disruptive. Nothing is worse than checking your mail after a few days and realizing you have a time-sensitive document you need to handle before tomorrow.
- Bandwidth
- Your bandwidth is your mental capacity to take on additional tasks or duties. If you’re spending time worrying about your business mail and neglecting other aspects of your business, you’re using your bandwidth ineffectively.
- Logistic tasks like dealing with mail and ensuring documents are filed correctly are tasks that you shouldn’t have to worry about. Instead, you should use the tools you have at your disposal to save your bandwidth for important tasks.
Fortunately, business owners have countless tools at their disposal to prevent their business mail from becoming an impediment to their company’s success.
With the right tools and services, you can turn your business mail from something you dread dealing with into something that is dealt with without you even needing to think about it.
Don’t allow poor business infrastructure and a lack of foresight regarding your business mail to create an environment where you’re always playing catch up. When your time is spent trying to get back to a starting point, you’re never able to move forward.
More than anything, using a business mail service makes you a competitor.
Even among brick-and-mortar locations, competition is fierce. For virtual businesses, that competition is likely fiercer.
Don’t get left behind. Using Alliance’s Virtual Offices and mail forwarding add-ons, you can create an environment with robust mail forwarding and better collaboration.
How our mail forwarding solves these problems
Remote work isn’t going anywhere. A recent Stanford study shows that businesses that offer remote work are 50% less likely to experience difficult employee turnover.
The same study shows that workers with the option to work remotely are 13% more productive than their peers that don’t have the option for hybrid work.
Similarly, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has published another study showing a surprising 7.5% drop in productivity among remote workers returning to in-person environments.
Unfortunately, remote positions are so attractive to the modern worker finding a worthwhile remote position is getting progressively more difficult.
As a business owner, this can be used to your advantage. Virtual operations allow you to hire employees from anywhere in the world, so as more employees seek out remote work, the wider the worker pool you have to choose from.
With a wide employee pool, you can hire employees that are loyal, innovative, willing to work, and passionate about what they’re doing. There’s no perfect way to prepare for an economic downturn, but finding key employees that feel a kinship with your business is a great way to weather any financial storm.
Read more: What Does a Recession Mean for Me and My Business?
Knowing that remote work is here to stay and that hybrid workstyles attract the best workers, what can your business do to deal with the frustrations of your business mail?
How can you ensure you’ve got a clean workflow without sacrificing the ability to stay on top of any sensitive or important documents?
The answer is simple. You need a Virtual Office with mail forwarding capabilities.
Our mail forwarding service is a feature of our Virtual Offices. It’s necessary if you want to get the full value of your Virtual Office.
Before we dive further into mail forwarding and the benefits it provides for your operations, let’s take a moment to explore the other benefits of Virtual Offices and the amenities that Alliance provides to its partners and clients.
- Cost-efficient
- In the past, starting a business was prohibitively expensive. Commercial leases lasted anywhere from 3-to-5 years, security deposits, rent, and monthly utility fees quickly added up, and picking the wrong location could doom your business before you even opened the doors.
- With a Virtual Office, this isn’t the case. Our plans start with an easy-to-manage 6-month minimum, and the cost-efficient price point allows you to save money that can then be reinvested into your business.
- Additionally, with a Virtual Office, you only pay for what you need, when you need it, which saves you an inordinate amount of money long-term.
- Flexible
- Flexibility is paramount to the success of modern businesses. The market is constantly shifting, and narratives are constantly changing; the businesses that can capitalize on these changes and shifts in the market are the businesses that will be around for decades to come.
- With a Virtual Office from Alliance, you can register an LLC in any state and almost any city you can think of. This means you can easily corner new markets with satellite offices and onboard new team members from anywhere worldwide.
- Through your Virtual Office, your hiring pool becomes exponentially larger, giving you flexibility in the hires you make.
- Private
- Because starting a digital business is so straightforward, some business owners are under the impression that they can simply register their businesses with their home addresses; this is a mistake.
- When you register your business with your home, your personal information is immediately added to the public domain. This means that disgruntled consumers, frustrated ex-employees, or anyone else curious enough to look has easy access to your name, where you live, and other sensitive information.
- With a Virtual Office, you’re registering your business to a physical business address, keeping your sensitive information out of the public domain.
- Access to coworking spaces and meeting rooms
- Possibly the largest single benefit of using an Alliance Virtual Office is the ability to easily reserve meeting rooms or coworking spaces.
- Anyone who’s worked remotely for any extended amount of time knows the frustrations and monotony associated with spending so much time at home. Sometimes, you need a break from your daily routine to refresh, recharge, and revisit your work with new inspiration.
- Through Alliance, you have access to coworking spaces that you can use to add a bit of variety to your weekly schedule. There’s no better way to revitalize your work than spending time with other motivated entrepreneurs working just as hard as you are. Not to mention, you can give your employees the same opportunity to change their routines.
- Hosting meetings, virtual or in-person, is a key part of running a business. Whether it’s meetings with investors or potential clients, having a place to host these meetings allows you to stop worrying about where the meetings will take place and instead focus on how to host the best meeting possible.
- Alliance’s meeting rooms come in a variety of sizes to accommodate any sized meeting you might be dealing with.
- Full integration with other tools and services
- In addition to integrating with the best business mail service imaginable, your Virtual Office is fully customizable and able to integrate with other tools.
- Need a virtual receptionist or virtual phone number? Not an issue with your Virtual Office.
- How about payroll automation or workflow platforms? Again, they’ll work perfectly with your Virtual Office.
As you can see, Virtual Offices have countless benefits and amenities outside of mail forwarding, but without mail forwarding, it’s almost impossible to make adequate use of these amenities.
Read more: Premium Mail Forwarding
Our business mail service allows you to automate your mail delivery, eliminating the time you spend driving to the center.
Not only does this mean you have more time to work, and thus make money, but it can also make that work more efficient by freeing up mental real estate and letting you focus.
Below, we’ve explored Alliance’s mail forwarding options that you can use with your Virtual Office. Keep in mind, these prices might vary slightly by location.
- Monthly mail forwarding for $10.00 per month
The first tier, monthly mail forwarding, is a good starting point for new businesses.
If you’re just getting your feet wet and hoping to learn as you go, the monthly mail forwarding option is a low-cost way to ensure you never go more than a month without accessing your mail.
Keep in mind, this tier is great for new businesses. Still, if you’re in the middle of any kind of legal dispute or other situation that would result in time-sensitive documents coming to your mailing address, you should probably pick a more regular mail forwarding tier.
- Twice monthly, or biweekly, mail forwarding for $20.00 per month
The second option, biweekly mail forwarding, is another tier better designed for newer businesses or companies dealing with a lull in business mail volume.
If you’re in the middle of rebranding your company or trying to shift consumer perception, you might not be getting a lot of mail. For businesses that are still active but in the middle of widespread changes, the biweekly option is a great way to ensure you never go more than two weeks without accessing your mail.
Similar to the issues with the monthly mail forwarding, this likely isn’t regular enough if you’re dealing with frequent time-sensitive documents.
- Weekly mail forwarding for $30.00 per month
Weekly mail forwarding is for businesses that are picking up speed and growing quickly.
Weekly mail forwarding ensures that you never go longer than a week without accessing your business mail and is likely frequent enough to prevent you from getting caught off guard by any time-sensitive documents.
Businesses experiencing an explosion in mailing volume due to a viral marketing initiative or another volume-increasing phenomenon can use the weekly tier if they’re a little wary of trying the daily mail forwarding option.
- Daily mail forwarding for $70.00 per month
Daily mail forwarding is reserved for businesses receiving a sizable amount of business mail and don’t want to go longer than a day without accessing that mail.
If you’re in the middle of any kind of legal dispute or situation that results in your business frequently receiving time-sensitive mail, the daily option is the best way to stay on top of any correspondence or documents you receive.
Keep in mind, you can move through the tiers as needed. If your business experiences a lull, you can switch to one of the lower tiers of mail forwarding; then, as volume returns, you can switch back to a higher tier to ensure you never miss any mail.
While each mail forwarding tier serves a distinct purpose, the fourth and final tier is undeniably the best value for your money.
The first two tiers cost $10.00 and $20.00, respectively, which means that you’re spending $10.00 any time your mail is forwarded. The third tier is $30.00 per month, which means you spend about $7.50 each time your mail is forwarded.
With the fourth option, depending on the number of business days in a given month, you spend between $3.11-$3.69 every time your mail is forwarded.
Using the right Virtual Office in conjunction with a business mail service built to benefit your operations allows you to create healthy workflows, a robust business infrastructure, and the ability to plan for long-term success.
Incorporating your business mail service into your Virtual Office
A business mail service may seem superfluous, but it’s the key to optimizing your workflow.
Our mail forwarding saves you time directly and allows you to make more efficient use of your time while reducing stress.
You don’t need a business mail USPS account to manage your incoming mail effectively; you just need a high-quality Virtual Office with mail forwarding capabilities.
In addition to mail forwarding, Alliance’s Virtual Offices allow you to integrate with countless other tools.
As a business owner, answering phone calls and providing information to curious consumers or potential clients while maintaining your company’s daily operations can be difficult. Thankfully, there are services you can use that allow you to negate this problem without needing to hire for a new position.
With a Live Receptionist, you can focus on the key aspects of your company, while our friendly and professional receptionists focus on strengthening client relationships.
This way, you don’t have to make a part or full-time hire, you don’t have to worry about incessant phone calls, and you can finally focus on the more nuanced aspects of growing your company.
The Live Receptionists personally screen and answer every phone call you receive, so you don’t have to worry about customers slipping through the cracks.
Your Virtual Office might have a professional and well-known business address, but what does your phone number look like? If you’re using a personal phone number or another less-than-professional number, it will directly impact others’ perception of your business.
With Alliance, you can easily use our Virtual Phone to separate your personal calls from your business calls, leading to a healthier work-life balance.
The Virtual Phone keeps your sensitive information private while giving you a dedicated business phone number to use on any branding material or other marketing initiatives.
Additionally, unlimited extensions mean you can easily onboard new team members.
Your Virtual Office’s business mail service might be what allows you to create healthy workflows, but the endless customization of your Virtual Office is what allows you to create a long-lasting business from anywhere in the world.
Further reading
- Premium Mail Forwarding
- What Does a Recession Mean for Me and My Business?
- Virtual Office Services MUST Include These Key Features
- Satellite Office: Your Complete Guide
Alliance Virtual Offices provides countless solutions for established entrepreneurs, new business owners, and everyone in between.
Utilizing a high-quality business mail service allows your company to stay on top of important government correspondence and time-sensitive documents. With your Virtual Office, you can easily add mail forwarding to accomplish this.
Contact us today to see what kind of business mail service Alliance can provide for your Virtual Office, and be sure to check out our Virtual Office Blog for more tips and tricks for modern business owners.
