Consolidate Mailpieces and Save
By Ken Renko, Product Marketing Manager, Pitney Bowes Emtex Software
As gas prices soared, carpooling became increasingly popular as people shared rides rather than driving separately in an effort to save money and conserve resources. The parallel in the print-to-mail business is a mail optimization strategy known as householding that combines multiple mailpieces in one envelope going to the same recipient to accomplish similar objectives.
Today, many companies have invested in CRM and cross-selling initiatives to deepen customer relationships. While these efforts are very effective at building loyalty, they often generate new customer communications, statements and invoices that are mailed separately by different lines of business. The result is higher mailing costs—at a time when postal rates are already rising.
With householding and the new focus on letter shape and size, mailers can save money by combining several documents in one higher-weight envelope, leading to an exponential savings on materials, pre-sort processing, and postage.
The householding effect: save on postage and more
To get a sense of just how much house-holding can save, consider this example. A financial services firm mails a statement once a month detailing account status of high-net worth clients. Meanwhile another line of business is mailing a cross-sell offer for a new life insurance product to the same clients.
This is a great opportunity for enhancing the relationship with the customer. But it’s a costly undertaking for the mail operation now tasked with sending two separate communications to hundreds of thousands of customers. Mailing a promotional offer for another line of business not only doubles the number of mailpieces, it also doubles the postage, material and labor, taking mailing costs to higher levels. But higher costs don't have to be a foregone conclusion. What if the financial services company combined both documents in one envelope? With this strategy, the technology investment can probably pay for itself in as little as a month.
Let's take a closer look at the potential opportunity within this example.
The financial services provider mails 250,000 statements a week—one million per month. In addition, they send a million mailpieces with a cross-sell offer to the same households for double hard dollar costs. However, if the company leveraged householding and included the cross-sell offer in the statement mailing, they could eliminate postage, materials and processing costs resulting in significant savings each month.
Householding isn't just for financial services applications. The potential for savings can be realized in any business where multiple mailings are being sent to the same person or household, such as government entities mailing unemployment checks, stimulus checks or letters to the same recipient.
Key to success: know your customer and your tools
The cornerstone of any successful householding effort is customer knowledge. Combining disparate communications requires planning, but it's easier than you might expect. Today, there are software solutions that perform printstream and workflow re-engineering to enable you to modify and combine print-ready files without making programming changes to the underlying applications. Likewise, customer and Production Intelligence® solutions can work seamlessly together to increase communications effectiveness.
Pitney Bowes Production Intelligence® solutions can help you implement a householding strategy and start saving.
Virtual Intelligent Presentation (VIP)™ solutions provide real-time printstream transformation and centralized print production management without the limitations of proprietary vendors and formats.
Virtual Document Enhance (VDE)™ solutions allow you to merge disparate input print files from the statement and promotional piece, sequence them by recipient or household based on a matched name, address and account number to enable householding.
File Audit/Integrity Solutions streamline and automate production processes, provide job and piece-level tracking, integrity tracking, a verifiable audit trail and automate reprints.
Start saving today
Leveraging a mail optimization strategy such as householding can deliver a rapid ROI and extraordinary cost savings. To find out how a smart householding solution can help you save money, learn more about Pitney Bowes Production Intelligence® software solutions by visiting our website at http://www.emtex.com/.
Questions? Contact me directly with your thoughts and comments at krenko@us.emtex.com
Ken Renko has been involved with printing systems and output management technology companies for more than 25 years. He joined Pitney Bowes' Emtex Software in 2006 as a Product Marketing Manager in Boca Raton, Florida and is responsible for product management and marketing support for industry-leading enterprise output management solutions including: Virtual Intelligent Presentation (VIP)™, Virtual Document Enhance (VDE)™, FlexServer and P/I Wizard. Before joining Pitney Bowes Emtex Software, Ken held various technical and marketing support positions with Océ Digital Document Systems and the Xerox Printing Systems Group. The combined years of experience in the electronic document industry have provided him with an objective understanding of the requirements and challenges that impact transactional printing, document output management, multi-vendor workflows and variable data applications. He has developed a number of white papers, authored several industry articles and has been a regular presenter at Xplor and On Demand.