The Unmistakable ROI of Leveraging Personalized Mail and Automation

By Drew Sprague, President, Solimar Systems

You’re reading this article because you know how valuable personalized mail is. Although mail volumes have been declining for some time, the inherent value of personalized correspondence remains an essential element of communication between businesses and their consumers.

Today, we still find many mailers feel locked into traditional, and even manual, methods of onboarding, producing and tracking this personalized content—if personalization is even offered. These aging approaches and methods to print and mail can be a missed opportunity for increased profitability and opportunity. And this opportunity could be with existing customers or make it possible to attract new business.

For almost 30 years, Solimar Systems has been empowering mailers to deliver significantly better operational results through forward-looking software solutions. And even now, with the turbulence in consumer markets, a large percentage of our customers continue to add software infrastructure to become more effective and more efficient in delivering personalized mail and communicating with consumers. It is a simple way to expand offerings and drive more business success.

Solimar’s customers include many well-known print service providers (PSPs), direct mail houses, financial services firms, government organizations, as well as other businesses that print and mail. Typically, these entities have two primary goals when deploying such software infrastructure:

1. Enabling new capabilities and revenue
2. Reducing operational costs

Mailers who have implemented BCC Software solutions in tandem with Solimar solutions have achieved significant cost savings from the ability to manage address cleansing and postage optimization in highly automated workflows. These postal savings derive from a number of incremental tactics, including:

• Removing undeliverable content
• Correcting addresses before mailing
• Presorting content
• Householding content and reducing envelopes mailed
• Aggregating content that is created in small (sometimes individual) quantities

These highly automated workflows provide collateral benefits to mailers. Those benefits often include better job and mail piece visibility, electronic delivery capabilities and reprint automation. Such visibility can dramatically improve customer service, further reducing costs and reinforcing brand satisfaction. Electronic delivery capabilities enable consumer self-service. Reprint automation underpins service level commitments while minimizing manual interventions.

As the evolution of consumer correspondence continues, investing in software to manage mailing processes remains a smart strategy as a cornerstone of a consumer communication infrastructure. Such an investment simplifies and resolves inevitable challenges such as:

• Postage continuing to become more expensive
• Personalized content that is produced in smaller jobs or runs
• Service commitments that demand tighter tracking and verification
• Marketing organizations demands for more full color personalization to tell and sell a message
• Consumers that are more specific about their preferences

To empower your organization to adapt to new requirements and technology systems, we recommend deploying software that leverages your legacy workflows, provides quick Returns on Investment (ROI), and flexibly integrates prevailing and emerging content standards. From our experience, such software should allow you to confidently embrace PDF throughout your internal and external workflows. Indeed, for the last 20 years, Solimar has been helping mailers migrate to PDF-centric workflows that deliver more flexibility and greater economy in high volume, personalized correspondence whether that correspondence is by mail or electronic delivery.

Even if your organization has been relying on AFPDS for years, it’s time to look at what PDF can do for you. In fact, one good way to leverage PDF if you currently have an AFPDS printing and mailing workflow is to embed PDF files within your AFP datastream to replace pre-printed forms.

There are many reasons to think about PDF as a mailer who currently relies on AFPDS:

1. PDF is a preferred format for electronic delivery
2. Full-color devices are increasingly available as PDF-only devices
3. Electronically commingling and presorting content is straightforward in PDF
4. PDF provides a very rich color and vector palette, enabling you to satisfy market demands

And if you find you aren’t getting the postal savings you should, it’s probably time to talk to BCC Software and Solimar Systems about valuable software investments you can make. By saving money on postage and optimizing your workflow processes, you can deliver significant savings for your clients while enabling investments in technology that can create new revenue streams and operational benefits for your organization.

We invite you to contact your BCC Software Sales Representative today to learn more.