- Why your business mail matters more than you realize
- How should you approach mail for business?
- The best business mail solution
- Taking your Virtual Office to the next level
Q: Does my business mail matter? What should I do to make my mail for business more secure?
A: Your business mail is important because there are countless confidential documents and time-sensitive government correspondences that you might receive in the normal day-to-day of running your business. Staying on top of your business mail keeps you from missing important dates or alienating customers looking for a response. The best way to take control of your business mail is through a Virtual Office.
In 2022, Pew Research interviewed almost 6,000 American workers to determine the lasting effects the pandemic has had on the workforce.
Unsurprisingly, remote work doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.
Over 60% of workers who can work remotely are doing so. What many economists and executives chalked up to a fad that would wear off when fears of Covid-19 subsided has turned into a workstyle that employees are demanding because they want to work remotely, not because of pandemic fears.
With this transition to remote and hybrid workstyles have come countless questions from business owners trying to expand and new entrepreneurs starting new, digital-first businesses.
From cost-efficient methods of registering your LLC, choosing the best state to register in, or even determining how to create a satellite office to capture more market share, there is a lot to learn. Another common question that modern business owners are learning to deal with is what should be done concerning your mail for business.
Especially with digital-first operations, it can be easy to lose sight of your business mail and its proper handling, but this can have a detrimental long-term effect on your company.
In this article, we’ll cover why your mail for business matters more than you realize, the best way to approach mail for business, and Alliance Virtual Office’s mail forwarding solutions. Finally, we’ll look at ways to integrate your Virtual Office with additional digital tools.
So, before you start seeking out a mail-for-business association, take the time to read below and gain an understanding of why you need to pay special attention to your business mail – and how a Virtual Office from Alliance can help you accomplish this.
- Why your business mail matters more than you realize
- How should you approach mail for business?
- The best business mail solution
- Taking your Virtual Office to the next level
Why your business mail matters
Why your business mail matters Now, any kind of mail for business is important, but for all-virtual companies, paying attention to your business mail might be the difference in a lawsuit or an amicable resolution.
Forbes estimates that almost 20% of American workers are fully remote, and another 62% are employed with hybrid workstyles. With approximately 80% of Americans working remotely at least occasionally, the benefits of learning how to best manage digital-first businesses are clear.
Finding common ground between the standard practices of a physical business and an online business can be difficult, especially when you aren’t simply getting mail in an easy-to-reach mailbox each morning.
Fortunately, you have access to endless resources about the best ways to start this journey. Even if you’ve owned a brick-and-mortar storefront for years but are hoping to expand into the world of ecommerce or other digital-first operations, the transition will require some heavy lifting on your part.
Read more: Getting Started With Alliance Virtual Offices
Thankfully, the capital requirements of virtual business ventures aren’t anywhere near as stringent or expensive as the requirements for physical businesses or commercial workspaces.
Conversely, the benefits of using modern virtual tools to create digital businesses, satellite offices, or subsidiaries typically far outweigh the benefits associated with a traditional lease.
That said, business owners should look for any kind of mail for business enquiry they can find to ensure they fully understand how important it is to stay on top of their business mail.
Even as a digital business, you will be on the receiving end of countless sensitive and important documents, and missing these correspondences can have a detrimental effect on your company’s ability to scale.
We’ve put together a small list of how the mail for business you receive can make a long-term difference in your company’s success.
- Invoices, purchase orders
- Customer correspondence
- Payments
- New business opportunities
- Feedback
Invoices, purchase orders
As a business owner, there’s a great chance you’ll be on the receiving end of several invoices and purchase orders that you’ll need to keep up with for several reasons.
- Financial record-keeping
- The cleaner your books are, the easier time you’ll have when it comes time to pay taxes. There’s no way to run a business effectively while missing invoices and purchase orders.
- Legal compliance
- The IRS hired almost a thousand new employees last year. With this increase in staffing, you’ll want to ensure that you have verifiable proof of any transactions you will be claiming. Staying on top of your mail for business will help you stay compliant with tax laws and required payments.
- Inventory management
- Purchase orders can help you keep up with your inventory levels. Using open purchase orders to determine what you’ve ordered and when it’ll arrive allows you to keep from running out of stock on any particular item or service that you’re selling
- Business analysis
- Outside of the clear logistic benefit that staying on top of mail for business provides, paying attention to your invoices and purchase orders gives your company valuable data and business analysis that you can use to identify customer behaviors and further define your target audience.
Invoices and purchase orders are just two examples of the kinds of financial information that keeping up with your business mail provides.
Customer correspondences
Once your business is up and running, there’s a good chance you’ll begin dealing with some kind of customer complaint or problem they’ve had with their purchase.
Ignoring the mail for business you receive can create tension between your company and its customers, sometimes resulting in a loss of brand loyalty and bad word-of-mouth reviews from those individuals.
By staying on top of your business mail, you can sometimes catch these customers before they’ve even written a scathing Google review. Typically, customers just want to feel heard and appreciated.
Sure, there will undoubtedly be situations wherein you’re dealing with an individual who is impossible to please. Still, even in those situations, a quick response time is a great way to show your customers that you care.
Payments
In addition to invoices and purchase orders, staying on top of the mail for your business can help you retrieve payments you might have forgotten about or neglected to collect.
Simply by using a mail-for-business opportunity, your company can practice better financial literacy and keep better track of its finances, resulting in an environment where you’re completely aware of any payments your business is owed.
A lack of attention to your business mail can result in situations where you’re unaware of what you’re owed, messing up your balance sheet and causing problems when tax time arrives. You want to ensure you’re receiving mail on a good enough schedule so you can secure checks and money orders and promptly deposit them to maintain a positive cash flow.
New business opportunities
Business mail is an undeniably great way to secure new customers and increase your market share. Some might think of business reply mail as an out-of-date way of marketing your company, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Read more: Business Reply Mail: A Small Business Guide
Alternatively, simply responding to customer questions and concerns is a great way to secure additional business. Careful attention to your mail for business can result in countless new business opportunities solely because you’re paying attention and not allowing any potential consumers to feel like they were ignored.
Feedback
Now, you can’t just listen to every piece of feedback you receive because doing so will result in you spending all your time trying to please every individual. That said, there’s a happy medium that you can hopefully attain through the use of careful attention to your mail for business.
This might be feedback about specific products or services, feedback about customer issues online, or anything else about your company’s operations.
Using this feedback, you can compile a realistic picture of things your business should work on for future success.
As you can see, taking care of your mail for business and ensuring you aren’t missing important correspondence is a great way to run a healthy digital-first company.
Properly managing incoming mail can help maintain a professional image and foster positive relationships with customers, vendors, and other business partners.
This all sounds great, but what if you receive a mail for a business proposal that sounds too good to be true? How can you ensure that you’re dealing with a reputable company?
Should you invest in your business mailing system?
Should you invest in your business mailing system? Instead of accepting the first mail forwarding for business system you come across, take some time to research your options and find a secure and well-rated provider that can fully meet your company’s unique needs.
Read more: Premium Mail Forwarding
Investing in a business mailing system is a great decision for your company’s infrastructure, but it isn’t a decision you should take lightly. Realistically, you should search for a Virtual Office provider that offers mail forwarding add-ons in addition to other amenities.
Alternatively, you may be tempted to handle incoming mail yourself, without any help. This is almost always a bad idea.
Typically, this means registering your business with your home address, which is a high-risk decision and often makes scaling your business much more difficult. Additionally, this makes your mail vulnerable, as anyone can find your address on a registry or through the public domain and take sensitive mail out of your mailbox.
Simply put, there’s no security.
You might think you can avoid these issues by using a PO box, which brings up a whole new slew of issues.
First, you can’t register your business as an LLC with a PO box in most states. Typically, you need to use a physical mailing address instead of a single mailbox.
Next, when you use a PO box, you’re responsible for picking up the mail or paying an employee to pick it up. If you do this, you’ll need to consistently travel to your PO box to retrieve your mail, which isn’t just tedious but can result in missed deadlines and opportunities.
Finally, using a PO box as the address to your business mail comes to is limiting your business’s image and credibility. It’s hard to portray a professional image when using a PO box on your branding and marketing materials.
Essentially, the right business mailing system is a perfect way to streamline and automate the arduous process of sending physical mail while reducing the chance of user error and saving a considerable amount of time.
Not to mention, mail forwarding for businesses can provide features like different tiers based on your company’s mail volume, bulk mailings, and mail tracking data that your company can use to create more detailed customer profiles moving forward.
So, the answer to the question “should you invest in your business mailing system” is an unequivocal “yes” – but you need to ensure that you’re using the right mail for business system.
What’s the best solution?
What’s the best solution? As it stands, the best solution to keep a handle on your mail for business is through the use of a Virtual Office.
Before we explain how a Virtual Office is the best solution, let’s take a quick moment to explain what a Virtual Office is. Not all Virtual Offices are created equally.
At its core, a Virtual Office is a service entrepreneurs can use to register a business with a physical address. For established entrepreneurs with long-lasting businesses, the service can be used to create satellite offices in new locations.
That said, the amenities provided and the quality of the physical address determines your virtual office’s value. To check out these amenities and determine what kind of Virtual Office would work well with your business, read this.
Read more: Virtual Office Services MUST Include These Key Features
The difference between high-quality Virtual Offices and low-quality virtual offices is fairly straightforward.
A low-quality virtual office is a service that doesn’t offer a designated physical address, uses virtual addresses that don’t exist, or are just PO boxes. As you know, you can’t register a business with a PO box, so these virtual offices are effectively worthless.
In addition, the low-quality offices won’t give you access to physical workspaces or meeting rooms.
One of the largest risks associated with using a low-quality virtual office is the risk of being associated with a scam company. In recent years, scammers have become ubiquitous, and many of these low-quality virtual office providers aren’t concerned with properly vetting the individuals who want to use the service.
On the other hand, high-quality Virtual Offices use professional and well-known addresses that will instantly boost your company’s legitimacy and allow you to register anywhere you’d like.
Additionally, high-quality Virtual Offices give you access to easily-reservable meeting rooms and coworking spaces that you can use to enjoy a hybrid workstyle. If you’ve ever worked from home for an extended amount of time, you likely understand how frustrating it can be to work in the same space you spend all of your free time.
With a high-quality Virtual Office like the ones that Alliance Virtual Offices provides, your business can easily prepare for the future while staying on top of any business mail you receive.
Below, we’ve taken a look at why Alliance’s Virtual Offices are the best option for your mail for business.
- Safe and secure
- Various tiers
Safe and secure
Alliance’s Virtual Offices provide a safe and secure location for your mail to arrive.
No one but you and the individuals that you designate can access your mail in your Virtual Office center.
This means that you don’t have to worry about someone mishandling your mail, you don’t have to worry about your mail being incorrectly handed to the wrong individual, and you don’t have to worry about bad actors being able to access your mail while you’re not in the area.
There is no better way to obliterate the company-customer relationship than allowing customer information or other personal details to fall into the hands of bad actors.
When customer information is leaked, your company will spend considerable time rebuilding consumer loyalty, so much so that it might take years to get back to where you were before the data breach occurred.
Various tiers
Another excellent amenity associated with Alliance’s Virtual Offices and mail forwarding add-on is the ability to choose the mail forwarding frequency that works best for you and your company.
This way, you can have your mail delivered securely, saving you lengthy trips while streamlining your mail process so you never miss a thing.
We’ve covered the four mail forwarding tiers below, but keep in mind that the prices might vary slightly depending on where your Virtual Office is located.
- Once monthly mail forwarding – $10.00
The first tier is the lowest frequency mail forwarding option, so it is typically used by newer businesses finding their footing or by businesses experiencing a lull in mailing activity.
With the once-monthly mail forwarding option, you will spend $10.00 each time your mail is delivered.
- Twice monthly mail forwarding – $20.00
Next, bi-weekly (or twice-monthly) mail forwarding is slightly higher in frequency, but still best reserved for businesses that aren’t receiving a high volume of mail.
With twice-monthly mail forwarding, you should be able to answer any time-sensitive documents in time, but you might be cutting it close in some situations. Using this tier is a great way to determine how often you need to receive your mail for business.
You will also be spending $10.00 per forward with this tier of mail forwarding.
- Weekly mail forwarding – $30.00
The third option, weekly mail forwarding, is a great option for businesses that are picking up customers and growing successfully.
Weekly mail forwarding ensures you won’t be too late on any time-sensitive documents and helps you keep any correspondences feeling like you’re aware of their time.
This option is slightly more cost-efficient than the previous two tiers. Each mail forwarding delivery you receive will cost about $7.50 – depending on the month.
- Daily mail forwarding – $70.00
The fourth and final option, daily mail forwarding, is best reserved for businesses receiving a heavy volume of business mail and are unwilling to let that mail go unchecked for a week.
This method of receiving your mail will all but guarantee that you’re never late on any important correspondence or time-sensitive documents. This is also the best value option that your business can access.
Daily mail forwarding results in 19-22 deliveries per month, which averages between $3.19 and $3.69 per mail delivery – making the final tier the most cost-efficient option available.
Alliance Virtual Offices provides the best solution for your business, regardless of the mail forwarding tier that you choose. The customization associated with your Virtual Office will quickly become your favorite aspect of using one of Alliance’s Offices.
Upgrading your Virtual Office
Upgrading your Virtual Office Your business mail is crucial to keep your business legal and to making the most of your growth.
Sending your mail to a PO box or your home carries severe risks.
With a Virtual Office, you have the best of both worlds, streamlining the process of receiving your mail while giving you an additional layer of security.
Part of what makes your Virtual Office so impressive is the ability to integrate your office with any solution you see fit.
Want a virtual receptionist to help you answer phone calls, build better customer relations, and reduce the hiring you need to do? Not an issue; Alliance has Live Receptionists that your business can easily integrate into your Virtual Office.
Do you want a virtual phone number to use with your professional business address to keep as much of your personal information private as possible? Again, no problem; Alliance’s Virtual Phone gives you the utmost privacy and unlimited extensions, so you can offer that same privacy to any new team members you onboard.
Regardless of what the tool is, you’ll be able to quickly and efficiently integrate it into your Virtual Office. If you run into any issues, you can contact our onsite or remote support staff for any technical help imaginable.
Further reading
- Premium Mail Forwarding
- Virtual Office Services MUST Include These Key Features
- Business Reply Mail: A Small Business Guide
- Getting Started with Alliance Virtual Offices
Alliance Virtual Offices provides digital tools and services for business owners, entrepreneurs, and anyone else looking to explore the world of digital-first operations.
Don’t skimp on your mail for business system – use a Virtual Office to create the best infrastructure to guarantee your company’s long-term success.
Contact us today to see what Alliance Virtual Offices can do for you, and be sure to check out our Virtual Office Blog for more helpful tricks and tips.
