What is hybrid mail and how can it save my business money?

Ian Forster, Adare SEC’s Sales Director, highlights why businesses should consider a hybrid mail solution.

Many businesses these days are embracing hybrid mail, a solution that can significantly reduce costs and save on resources while still ensuring a quality service when communicating with customers.

What is hybrid mail?

Hybrid mail enables letters that would normally be printed via local desktop or office printers to instead be outsourced for production and mailing.Employees can quickly and easily send their communications to be printed at the click of a button, saving organisations significant time, resource and most of all postage and business stationery costs.

At Adare SEC, we save clients up to 60% on costs associated with the production and mailing of standard A4 letters through our hybrid mail solutions.

Communication comes at a cost

Quite simply, a hybrid mail solution reduces postal and business stationery costs. When analysing printing, personalisation and mailing costs for business-critical communications or letters– whether an important insurance policy, a sensitive document from a debt company, an invoice or customer update document – the focus naturally falls on regular, big volume mail outs.

Challenges of large volume mail outs are predictable in terms of timing and volumes, and organisations can easily identify and allocate the spend associated with such a visible operation. It’s the small volumes that are often missed, but these volumes very quickly add up to significant costs.

As a result, informed decisions can be made about the processing of such critical communications and many businesses are recognising the benefits of partnering with experts to reduce costs and increase efficiency.

But there is the danger of ‘burdened costs’ if mailing is done inefficiently. Burdened costs must be absorbed to print and mail documents in-house.

However, if in-house is the way businesses prefer, costs will add up from the likes of printer consumables being used, document production (such as pre-printed letterheads and envelopes) and management of those communications – which includes staff resources and time consumption.

The average burdened cost of sending a letter inserted into a C5 envelope could cost anything from £1.50 to £3**, according to our research at Adare SEC. Add more documents to that total for a bulk mail out and costs will soon mount.

Control, cost and consistency

When it comes to efficiency, businesses need a system in place to manage the print and postal spend so that it ensures brand consistency and costs are controlled and managed effectively.

A leading global insurance company wanted similar control in a system when communicating with its customers and all its staff across its UK offices. The company wanted a hybrid mail solution to make its correspondence efficient, reduce errors and improve turnaround times – and that in turn allowed for a better use of their support services without those added pressures.

Adare SEC introduced a hybrid mail solution for the insurance company’s employees to submit customer correspondence for production and mailing within Adare SEC. This resulted in a 40% cost saving of the original production and process costs and delivered on brand compliance.

Choosing an efficient system

Hybrid mail solutions, especially when bulk-sending communications to a raft of customers, are becoming more common in the business world.

If you want to go down the hybrid mail route, consider a system that enables staff to send print jobs via a desktop portal to a production site, such as Adare SEC’s PrintMe solution, which is cost effective and time-saving.

For more information, visit www.adaresec.com/printme or call 01484 863 411.