Most business people are smart at cutting expenses. However, one area most of them struggle with is saving money on postage.
While some just don’t know how to save money on small expenses like postage, some just don’t care. The funny thing is, such businesses lose huge amounts of money yearly only on postage ignorantly.
Cut cost by buying a Franking Machine
Imagine if your business sends up to a thousand mails every month at the cost of 1$ each, for instance. That will amount to $1,000 a month and $12,000 a year. Now imagine if you could cut the cost of mailing from $1 to $0.5, that would mean saving $500 a month and $6,000 a year.
That’s a huge sum of money that could take care of a whole lot of things, and yet it is sunk down in sending mail yearly. For this reason, many people are always on the lookout for ways to save when shipping as much as possible. This is why you should consider investing in the Franking machine. For more information visit fpmailing.co.uk.
A Franking machine will cost you between $1000-$1500 each or $500-$800 to rent, and the very high end ones cost as much as $25,000 or even more. But buying and using your own franking machine will give you a 5 cents discount on every standard mail you send.
Many companies have invested heavily in machines such as a franking machine in a bid to save as much money as possible. Both companies and individuals are constantly on the lookout for ways to save as much money as possible on not just shipping and postage, but as well on other of their expenses. As a business person, whether corporate or individual, to stay afloat, you need to continue to look for ways to save money; including on postage.
Some other methods that will help you save on postage include;
Automate
The smartest thing to do when you know you send a lot of mail is to find ways to make the processes simpler and easier. The easiest way to do that is to automate the process. You might need to invest in mail equipment and software which can help sort out mailing data and help you deal with issues of sorting names and addresses to prevent you from duplicating data.
You may need automatic mail openers, labellers and sealers to help you smoothen out the process. Franking machines can also help to speed up incoming and outgoing postages. The whole idea of this is to reduce the number of people you have to pay to handle these processes. The less people you have, the less you have to pay in salaries.
Ditch letters, go the postcard way
Postcards are better and cheaper when you don’t have a whole lot of information to convey. Apart from that, people find it easier to read than letters.
In some cases though, you will still need to send letters when the information you want to convey will overshoot the space available in a postcard.
Maximize mail costs by halving your mail
Instead of sending different mail at different times, why not put them all together and send them as one? Let’s say you want to send a marketing mail and a statement of account, instead of sending the marketing mail in a separate mail and the statement in another mail, you can put both together in one envelope and you would have halved the cost-effectively. The customer won’t even know about it and would even be grateful for having everything in one.
Sanitize your mailing list
You probably have been in business for 10 years or more and you have had a mailing list of different customers all these years. Some of them are dead. Some of them no longer live in the address you are sending mail to. Some of them are not even interested in what you are sending any longer.
Don’t you think it is time to sanitize your list? The Postal Service can offer you help in this regard, they can help you with addresses that have changed. Also, you may need to find a way of checking with your mail receivers to know if they are still interested in receiving mail from you. Doing this may look drastic, but it will help you cut costs on sending mail to people who are no longer interested in your mail.
Reduce the number of expedited mailing charges
There are times mails may need to be sent out urgently. In such cases, the mailing companies will have to raise the charges to the roof. You, of course, will have to pay because those mails need to leave your office. So how do you deal with that? The smartest thing to do is to plan ahead.
There are some mails that really do not need to fly and arrive the next day even though they appear so. If you plan ahead, you won’t have to be scrambling to send mail out at the last minute. Draw a plan out to know which mail should leave and when it is best to send them out. If at all there will be emergencies, they will be limited.
Try forever stamps
These are special kinds of stamps that can be purchased at the post office for the normal price. However, the advantage is, when prices of stamps go up in the future, these stamps don’t get affected by those price changes. Their prices remain forever the same. Just buy them in bulk and keep using them forever
As a business person, you will need to keep finding ways to save money and these 7 steps to save money on postage will definitely be helpful to you. And a little more research on the internet search engines as well as talking to other business owners would help you find some other methods through which you can easily save cost on postage.
