- Your business mail matters more than you think
- How to make sending your mail easier
- How to simplify receiving mail
- Small business mail and your Virtual Office
Q: Is my small business mail important? What can I do to simplify my incoming and outgoing business mail?
A: Small business mail is incredibly important because, as a business owner, you need to respond quickly to government correspondence and time-sensitive documents. Consider using a Virtual Office with mail forwarding capabilities to simplify your incoming and outgoing mail.
Remote work has its roots in a movement that predates the pandemic. But after government lockdowns and widespread business closures forced over 60% of American workers capable of working remotely into this new workstyle, remote workstyles, hybrid workstyles, and Covid-19 became inextricably linked.
Despite this link, the vast majority of American workers currently working remotely are doing so for many different reasons than at the height of the virus.
Then, most workers were working remotely out of fear, necessity, or because they had no other options. Now, most American workers capable of doing their jobs remotely are doing so because they want to, regardless of whether or not there’s another workspace available.
While some companies are doing everything in their power to drive public perception away from remote workstyles and back to in-office work, other businesses are taking full advantage of the increased productivity and lower operational costs associated with virtual business ownership.
That said, the transition to digital-first operations or even digital-first branches of your business has brought several questions that entrepreneurs and business owners must answer to scale their companies effectively.
One of these questions is how to deal with small business mail.
In the past, physical office buildings received their mail, and that was that. Now, as countless business owners make use of Virtual Offices to remain as flexible and cost-efficient as possible, handling your small business mailing looks much different than it did in the past.
In this article, we’ll look at why your small business mail matters, how to make sending small business mailers easier, how to simplify receiving business mail, and how small business mail and a high-quality Virtual Office can work together.
So, if you’ve accrued small business mailing supplies and are ready to start marketing, take a moment to read this article to help you get a better handle on how to make the most of your small business mail.
- Your business mail matters more than you think
- How to make sending your mail easier
- How to simplify receiving mail
- Small business mail and your Virtual Office
Why your small business mail matters
Starting a small business has never been easier, but that doesn’t mean it’s something you should try and accomplish without properly informing yourself.
Sure, the cost is lower than ever before, and with the help of an LLC your assets aren’t at risk, but taking the time to fully understand how the tools and services you have at your fingertips work is invaluable in the long term.
Read more: Getting Started With Alliance Virtual Offices
It doesn’t matter if you own an existing business and have decided to expand to online operations or if you’re a fledgling entrepreneur hoping to start a business yourself; how you handle your small business mail is paramount to your company’s long-term viability.
Why is this? Small business mail allows for direct communication with customers and clients, which can help build relationships and increase customer loyalty.
Below, we’ve listed three key ways communication directly benefits your business.
- Understand customer needs
- Improved customer satisfaction
- Better reputation, stronger brand image
Customer needs
Your customers aren’t always going to have static needs. Just like the market shifts, consumer sentiment shifts just as much.
Through direct communication, you can gain valuable insights into needs, wants, and pain points. Using the feedback that your customers provide, you can address their concerns and tailor your products or services to better meet the needs of your established customer base.
Using small business mail, you can stay on top of changes that need to be made, things you’re doing differently, and how the market is reacting to your business.
Customer satisfaction
Just like you use this communication to better understand your customers’ needs, you can also use small business mail to increase customer satisfaction.
The modern consumer has near-endless choices when looking for businesses to shop with, and you can’t always offer the lowest prices. Thankfully, you can use small business mail to stand out from your competition and create a connection with consumers.
Customers want to feel heard.
You can use small business mail to achieve this. When your customers feel heard and like their input is valued, they’re more likely to shop with you and recommend your business to others.
Brand image
With so much competition, your brand loyalty’s importance cannot be understated.
Using business mail to directly communicate and build relationships with your consumers allows you to build trust and credibility, leading to positive reviews, word-of-mouth marketing, and overall higher sales.
The more attractive your brand image is, the easier customer acquisition will be. The easier customer acquisition is, the better your company’s revenue is.
Outside of building connections, your small business mail can promote specific products or services and provide important information about applicable sales, coming discounts, or other events.
Using email is a great way to connect with consumers, but using physical small business mailers allows you to give your mailing list a physical reminder of upcoming dates they need to keep in mind.
Yes, email is objectively cheaper – but keeping up with a small business mail server can take a lot of work. Thankfully, in addition to the innumerable virtual services and tools you have access to, several great small business IT support resources are also available.
Read more: Outstanding Small Business IT Support Resources
One of the best ways to use your small business mail is to gather customer feedback and data, which can then be used to improve products and services, create a more detailed target customer profile, and make more informed business decisions.
Keep in mind, the information above refers mainly to outgoing small business mail, but incoming mail is equally as crucial to your business because it contains important government correspondences and other time-sensitive documents.
You need to respond to these to keep your business protected and legally compliant. Remember, your small business mail can be a useful tool, but you still need to ensure that you’re staying aware of any obligations you might have.
How to make sending business mail easier
With remote work remaining at the forefront of the public consciousness and labor economists expecting remote work to endure, you need to make the most of all available marketing opportunities.
At the end of the day, sending marketing emails is cheaper, so some business owners struggle to see the value in sending physical business mail.
That said, why choose? Small business mail provides unique benefits that email can’t account for, and email marketing campaigns don’t require a lot of upfront capital in the first place.
Instead of choosing one or the other, the best way to make your business truly stand out and the easiest way to create meaningful relationships with your customers is to use a combination of both options.
We’ve covered some reasons why your small business mail is important, but how can you efficiently use outgoing mail?
We’ve created a guide to various ways that you can make your outgoing small business mail an easier area to keep a handle on.
- Mailing software and automation tools
- Postal service discounts
- Professional mailing services
- Editorial processes
- Accurate recordkeeping
Mailing software and automation tools
Use mailing software and tools to automate and streamline the process of creating and sending mail. This could be tools like mail merge and address verification to save you time when sending mail.
Most of the mailing software you have at your disposal employ centralized management and automated processing, which allows you to manage all outgoing mail from one central location and makes it easier to reduce the amount of manual work needed.
Outside of simplifying the amount of manual work needed, using mailing software and automation tools improves the accuracy of your outgoing mail by removing the opportunity for human error.
Not to mention, mailing software and automation tools reduce your labor costs significantly, and you can take advantage of other opportunities on this list too.
Postal service discounts
Post offices often offer special event discounts and sales and regularly offer bulk discounts for large amounts of mail.
You can use mailing software to keep up with when these events and sales happen, but the discounts themselves provide countless opportunities for your business to streamline the process.
First, the cost savings are undeniable because sending physical mail can get expensive, especially as your company grows. Anything you can do to reduce your mailing costs will be reflected in your business’s profitability.
Next, these bulk discounts allow you to plan by offering predictable expenses and increased reliability. You know how much the discount rates are, and the postal service is relatively consistent, so you can create smarter and more precise budgets while feeling confident that your small business mail will reach the correct recipient.
Finally, the post office is evolving too. Many online tools will allow you to print postage directly from your computer, track your mailings, and keep up with upcoming events.
Professional mailing services
Alternatively, there are professional mailing services that will handle printing, stuffing, and mailing all of your mail pieces.
These services might be a little more expensive, but if your business handles a large enough volume of outgoing mail to make this service worthwhile, you’ll save a lot of money going this route.
More than anything, using a professional mailing service that isn’t directly related to your Virtual Office is wise if the time saved is worth more than the money spent.
For example, if you can earn X amount of money on a day you aren’t dealing with outgoing small business mail, but the professional mailing service costs Y, you want to ensure that X is greater than Y.
If this is the case, using a professional mailing service is the perfect way to save money, time, and effort that can each be reinvested directly into your company.
Editorial processes
Another way to ensure that you aren’t sending shoddy small business mail to your customers is to set up an editorial process that allows you to thoroughly proofread all mail pieces before sending to avoid errors and confusion.
If you’re just getting started with small business mail, this step is paramount to your company’s success. Sure, there are countless ways to automate the process, but when your business isn’t profitable yet and you’re trying to find your footing, it’s well worth it to take the time to put personal touches on the mail you send to create a stronger relationship with consumers.
An editorial process improves the quality of your outgoing mail, keeps it consistent with your company’s brand, results in better engagement, and, if you can cultivate a healthy enough business infrastructure, will increase the efficiency of producing high-quality content.
Accurate recordkeeping
Regardless of which methods you use to help your small business mail efforts, you must keep accurate records of all mailings, including who was sent mail, when it was sent, and what was included in the mailing.
This will help you track the effectiveness of your mailings while allowing you to create a more detailed consumer profile and make any necessary adjustments to your outgoing mail.
Realistically, every aspect of your business should have meticulous and concise recordkeeping.
Accurate records will help you stay in compliance with any relevant regulations or laws, and the data accrued will also help you make smarter financial decisions.
Not to mention, precise records will benefit your customers by allowing those individuals to access timely and accurate information about any transactions they’ve made or accounts they’ve created with your company.
Following these steps will help you make the most out of your outgoing small business mail, but how can you get the same benefits with your incoming small business mail too?
Keep reading to find out!
How to make receiving business mail easier and more efficient
Receiving small business mail is a bit different than sending mail, especially considering how many businesses are either satellite offices or wholly virtual companies.
For satellite offices, you can typically receive mail at your home office. That said, if you’re operating a satellite office in a different country, you would benefit from setting up your own small business mailing address.
Read more: Satellite Mobile Office: Unleash Full Flexibility
We’ve created another small list of methods for your business to make receiving its mail easier and more efficient.
- Dedicated small business mailing address
- Mail management services
- Organization system
- Virtual Offices
Small business mailing address
You should never register your business with your address. You don’t want your home added to the public domain, and the sheer volume of business mail you’ll start receiving would destroy any healthy work-life balance you might’ve previously maintained.
Alternatively, you can use a Virtual Office to set up a dedicated mailing address for your business to easily separate and organize all mail.
This gives you a centralized location to easily retrieve your mail without risking your personal information.
Mail management services
Dealing with unwanted mail is a massive waste of time. It’s necessary, but sifting through your mail to differentiate between the mail you must receive and the spam and junk mail will take up considerable time, especially as your business grows.
Instead, use a mail management service to handle sorting, scanning, forwarding important mail, and discarding unwanted mail.
Organization system
Just like you need to keep accurate records of your outgoing small business mail, you must ensure that your incoming mail is equally organized.
You need to implement a system for organizing and storing incoming mail.
This can be as simple as folders or labels that help you keep track of important documents and bills or something that results in a bit less clutter, like scanning the important documents onto your computer to remain as paperless as possible.
Virtual Offices
A Virtual Office is the best solution for all of this.
A Virtual Office allows you to set up a dedicated small business mailing address and handles mail forwarding for you so you can focus on your business.
With a Virtual Office, you can choose from four different tiers of mail forwarding. Remember that these tiers’ prices might vary depending on your Virtual Office’s location.
Once monthly mail forwarding for $10.00 per month is best reserved for newer businesses that are still finding their footing.
This first tier is a good way to ensure you never go more than a month without checking your mail, but as you can imagine, this won’t be anywhere near frequent enough as your business grows.
Twice monthly, or bi-weekly, mail forwarding for $20.00 per month is another tier that’s better for newer businesses starting to see a little more volume.
Bi-weekly mail forwarding provides a bit more frequency, but if you’re in the middle of any kind of legal dispute or receiving time-sensitive mail, the twice-monthly option likely isn’t frequent enough either.
Weekly mail forwarding for $30.00 per month is a bit more regular. This tier is for businesses seeing higher volume but not enough to justify the daily option.
Using the third tier of mail forwarding ensures that you’ll never go more than a week without seeing your mail, which is a good way to ensure you’re never late on time-sensitive documents or government correspondences.
Although a week won’t typically ever be enough time to miss a date you were responsible for holding, it might result in some situations where you feel unprepared to respond in the amount of time allotted.
Daily Mail forwarding for $70.00 per month is the fourth and final tier and is for businesses receiving a high volume of mail and need to see that mail as soon as possible.
The fourth tier is for more established businesses or businesses dealing with legal issues that require quick action.
One of the nicest aspects of these mail forwarding tiers is that your business can change tiers as it sees fit.
If you know a busy season is approaching, you can move up a tier to anticipate the higher volume. Conversely, if you know you’re about to experience a lull in business mail, you can go down a tier to save some money.
As you can see, using your Virtual Office’s premium mail forwarding is the best way to stay on top of your incoming mail without outsourcing the job.
Read more: Premium Mail Forwarding
When looking at the various tiers, the daily mail forwarding tier might seem like it’s the most expensive, but it’s the best value option by a considerable margin.
The first two tiers charge you about $10.00 each time your mail is forwarded, and the third tier charges you about $7.50 per forward. However, the daily mail forwarding option is so frequent that each mail forwarding only costs your business between about $3.19-$3.70.
With one of Alliance’s Virtual Offices, you can easily set up your office with the mail forwarding tier that works best for your business.
Now, let’s look at how your Virtual Office and small business mail integrate.
Small business mail and your Virtual Office
Your small business mail can be a powerful tool for marketing and connecting with leads and customers. Incoming mail is crucial too, as it is a necessary part of keeping your business compliant and informed.
A Virtual Office offers the best solution for simplifying incoming mail and provides a perfect location to handle your outgoing mail too.
With your Virtual Office, you can cultivate a business infrastructure that’s well-organized and precise with your outgoing mail while remaining unencumbered by whatever volume of incoming small business mail you’re receiving.
Further reading
- Premium Mail Forwarding
- Getting Started with Alliance Virtual Offices
- Outstanding Small Business IT Support Resources
- Satellite Mobile Office: Unleash Full Flexibility
Alliance Virtual Offices offers established entrepreneurs and new small business owners several tools and services that are designed to help companies grow.
Don’t allow your small business mail to get the best of your operations, utilize a Virtual Office, mail forwarding, and outgoing mail software to keep a firm grasp on all of your mailing operations.
Contact us today to see what Alliance can do for your company’s small business mail and be sure to check out our Virtual Office Blog!