Low cost mailing for small businesses
Added: 18/08/2010 Reporter: Peter James
There comes a time in every small business where the amount of mail being sent reaches a tipping point between the occasional letter and the regular marketing run. It's at this point that a small business owner may want to review their postal costs. Using a low cost franking machine may be the answer. When sending an occasional mailing, be it an invoice, an order, or even a package it is usually most effective to add stamps to the front of the envelope or box and then take it down to the local Post Office or Royal Mail post box. However, once mail quantities increase these costs of stamps and time can add up and a franking machine may be the answer.
Franking machines enable the small business owner to add a franking impression on to the envelope (or label in the case of a package) that tells Royal Mail that the postage has been paid. This postage is taken from an account that is topped up by the small business owner on a regular basis. The great advantage of using a franking machine in this way is that there is no need to purchase stamps in advance that could be "borrowed" by employees, and no need to wait in line at the Post Office to check the correct postage as most franking machines these days come with scales and postage chips to check the postage price for you and make their use very simple. If cash flow is a problem, many of the franking machine suppliers now allow payment of postage in arrears (i.e after you have sent the post). It is therefore possible to get payment for an invoice prior to having to pay for sending the invoice to the customer. At the time of writing a letter sent 2nd class using a franking machine cost 7p less in postage than using a stamp. This is all great business sense.
Because franking machines give the small business owner the ability to print postage, their design, manufacture, sale, and marketing is tightly controlled by Royal Mail. In fact in the UK it is really only possible to buy a franking machine from four different manufacturers (although some other outlets offer rebranded versions under licence). These manufactures are Neopost, Pitney Bowes, Frama, and Francotyp Postalia. Of these Pitney Bowes are by far the biggest manufacturer. Pitney Bowes offer low cost franking machines that can be leased for under £30 a month. As well as their low cost franking machine, Pitney Bowes also manufacture and sell franking machines to cater for all sizes of mailing, from 5 letters a day to thousands of mail pieces a day. The other manufacturers all offer franking machines in the small business market, with Neopost also expanding from the low cost franking machine market to cover most other market sectors.
So how does the small business owner choose the right franking machine? They have to ensure they are lowering the cost of their business mailing, and to do this they need to arm themselves with some facts from their business. They need to know, in a typical month, how many mail pieces their business sends, what class of mail they use, and what size / weight these mail pieces are. Once the small business owner has this information they can approach the franking machine companies from a position of strength, asking the various sales people to provide a cost savings analysis for their company's franking machine based on the small business owners real life figures. Not on an idea case study that suits the manufacturer. When working out the quantity and types of mail pieces the small business owner would be wise to look ahead within their business to see whether these figures would be likely to significantly change during the next few years or likely lifetime of ownership of the franking machine.
Another possible way to save money in mailing is to review all mail pieces that are going out. Do they need to go in the format or class that they are? Does the mail piece have to be sent at all. By analysing the mail pieces and adopting a franking machine to should be possible for a small business owner to save significant amounts of money and time each year.
