As a mail house owner or manager, you are constantly looking for ways to make your workplace more efficient. You’ve added barcodes to your driver tags, you pre-fill the mail trays before the afternoon rush, and you’ve even nailed down which employee has the magic touch when it comes to running the Buskro.
So when it comes to entering your clients’ packages into the postal-parcel ecosystem, why should your search for the most efficient tool for your business cease?
It shouldn’t.
To make it easy on you, we’ve exposed the 3 most common ways that mail houses enter packages that are unfortunately costing them time and money. Keep reading to find out about a 4th method that can actually SAVE you time and MAKE you money.
1. Meter the Packages
Some mail houses continued with business as usual when the USPS started requiring an IMpb. Not only are these mail houses losing money by forgoing the USPS commercial discounts, but they are actually losing package volume due to the inability for their customers to have tracking at their fingertips.
These mail houses will really be hurting when the USPS decides to retire the Label 400.
While the meter-mail house is chasing pennies on letter mail, the mail houses clients are sending their most profitable products through other couriers who offer online tracking. Heck, the meter-mail house may even be delivering pre-labeled stamps.com packages to the USPS on behalf of their clients as a courtesy.
Insert {Disappointed Head Shake Here}
2. Manually Enter Addresses into a Shipping Software
Many mail houses started to hand-type delivery addresses into shipping software and adhere a shipping label to the packages on behalf of their clients. Although this method is in compliance with the IMpb requirements, the processing time is slow. Average processing time can range from 35-70 seconds per package (depending on which software you choose). The manual-mail houses are unable to increase package volume with this method due to the outrageous labor costs that typically outweigh the commercial discounts.
The other drawback of this method is that the full liability of labeling packages is on the mail house. In fact, some mail houses have paid thousands of dollars in HIPPA fines due to accidental labeling mistakes. All we can say is if you use this method – make sure to take extra precautions when shipping prescriptions.
3. Enter Packages using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) System
Large volume mail houses use OCR technology to process packages on behalf of their clients. Basically, you take a picture of the address on the package, the machine reads the address, and spits out a shipping label. This equipment is expensive which may make it hard to justify for smaller mail houses.
Although OCR technology is constantly improving, it isn’t perfect, especially for handwritten addresses. This is why mail processors get excited when they receive a package with typed address information.
So my question is…
If these customers are printing address labels anyway, why aren’t they printing out a shipping label complete with the full IMpb?
This brings us to the 4th and final method. The method that will actually SAVE you time and MAKE you money.
4. Provide Your Customers an Easy Online Platform to Ship Through You!
What if your customers could log into your branded website, print IMpb compliant labels, track their packages, and pay their postage online with the same ease and power that the largest shipping competitors in the world offer?
Now they can, and offering this service is much easier than you would think.
With the help of the right tools, you can turn a clunky, inefficient, unprofitable headache (that packages have grown to be) into a major source of revenue with little to no investment. In fact, you can make money on packages you don’t even pick up!
I know, it sounds too good to be true right? Well, it’s not…
Mail houses are repurposing their infrastructure to provide the same great service in the shipping industry that they have provided in the letter-mail industry for decades. They are using their drivers to pick up mail and packages; they are using their scanning technology to reduce labor costs and liability; they are leveraging their customer base to create new sources of revenue; they are using their industry knowledge to simplify their customers’ lives, and they are finding that their pivot into the shipping industry is more natural and lucrative than they ever imagined. Suddenly, mail houses go from competing in a struggling mail industry to competing in the thriving, fast-paced shipping industry with seemingly unlimited future potential.
Mail houses that have already made the switch to this new technology are finding ways to add value not only to their daily pick-up customers, but they are finding that they have the tools to compete in the fulfillment and international consolidation markets.
