Home sweet home.
It is a timeless saying that praises the virtues of coming home after a hard day’s work or at the end of a much-deserved vacation. The COVID-19 pandemic added a second meaning to the popular saying.
Home sweet home for many businesses means working from the comfort of home.
If you run a home-based business, you always look for ways to maximize sales, while minimizing expenses. By working with advanced, but not highly technical equipment, you can benefit from custom mail services in many ways.
First, using custom mail services frees up more of your time. Instead of trying to find a missing group of invoices lost by the United States Postal Service (USPS), you send your mail and start working on another project without worrying about the status of the written correspondence. You also benefit from a much faster mail delivery process, which means you get invoices out faster to get paid faster. Custom mail services also eliminate any manual errors and other potentially costly mistakes.
Let’s take a quick look at four custom mail services that benefit home-based businesses.
Digital Printing
Digital printing saves your business money by dramatically reducing printing costs. You can complete small-batch orders, which helps your home-based business generate revenue when the demand for large-batch orders such as year-end mailings begins to slow down. This is an especially important service for home-based businesses that rely on seasonal and/or special event sales. Digital printing keeps revenue coming in even during times when large-scale projects come to an abrupt halt.
You can expect to produce a much higher quality of correspondence, whether you send out weekly newsletters or flyers promoting an upcoming event. Faster turnaround times allow you to print more materials in less time.
Correcting Incorrect Addresses
Postage remains one of the highest expenses for any type of business that relies on sending written correspondence to promote products and services. The most effective way to minimize postage costs is by using a custom mail service called Coding Accuracy Support System (CASS), which leverages certified software approved by the USPS
Using CASS software ensures you correct any incorrect addresses recognized by CASS software. All addresses organize into a sequence that meets the regulations established by the USPS.
Merge or Purge Duplicate Addresses
Like using CASS software to correct incorrect addresses, a merger or purge service reduces or eliminates costly duplicate addresses. Merge or purge software identifies multiple names for the same person. For example, someone named Bill also might receive mail under the name William. Using merge and purge software delivers one piece of mail to the address, while removing the duplicate name from a mailing database.
Access to NCOA
With studies demonstrating that up to 20 percent of the population in the United States moves every year, your home-based business needs to find a way to stay in touch with highly-mobile residents. The National Change of Address (NCOA) processing service updates every week to identify families, businesses, and individuals that have relocated across town or cross country. Accessing NCOA lets you know which of the people on your mailing lists no longer receives your correspondence.