Saving with Royal Mail CleanMail Plus
Added: 22/08/2006 Reporter: Peter James
How does a 19.5% saving off the cost of a stamp sound? As of 21st August the cost of sending a letter with Royal Mail will be 32p for a 1st class stamp and 23p for a 2nd class stamp. However sending the same letter using the Royal Mail CleanMail Plus discount scheme will only cost 26.4p for 1st class and 18.5p for 2nd class. That's a huge saving of either 17.5% or 19.5%.
So how do I get these discounts? Royal Mail CleanMail Plus is a workshare discount scheme. Therefore in order for a customer to get the discount they have to do a small amount of Royal Mails work for them. In the case of Royal Mail CleanMail Plus this means checking and cleaning the addresses on the envelope so that they meet with Royal Mail standards. Once the envelopes are filled they then need to be placed in Royal Mail trays and cages. At this point the customer can hand over to Royal Mail and they will come and pick up the mail and send it though their delivery network. The idea behind the discount scheme is that if Royal Mail have correctly addresses envelopes it is a lot easier for them to deliver them.
The discounts mentioned above assume that the customer places a Royal Mail Customer Barcode (CBC) just below the address on the envelope (or visible through the envelope window). This CBC contains the envelopes postcode in computer readable form. There are a number of software packages on the market that will check addresses against the Royal Mail standard and then correct those that it can. These packages often work at a database level. Indoc.s Plus supplied by PFE is one package that can actually correct the address and add the CBC during the printing stage. The advantages of this is that the user does not have to change anything in their source systems or databases. Indoc.s Plus takes a Windows PCL Print File from, for example Microsoft Word, extracts the address, checks it against the Royal Mail PAF database, and then overwrites the address in the PCL Print File with the corrected address and CBC. The resulting document that is printed out is the same as created by the user except for the address being corrected to Royal Mail standards. More information is available from PFE.
