Has this ever happened to you? The printer jams, just as you’re
trying to rush out a newsletter. Or you come up short on stationery and
stamps, a few letters short of your mailing list run. Or you’re on the
road with only a web-enabled phone at hand, when you remember an urgent note that must go out by mail…
Some days, we can’t help wishing that everyone had an email address!
The plain fact is, every organization has at least a percentage of contacts on our
mailing list who can only be reached by traditional “snail mail.” Not only that, some correspondence does need to be tangible -- our words do, still, command more authority and more attention when they are printed out on
a piece of paper the reader will hold in his hand.
No, it’s not time to write off the traditional letter post, not
quite yet — but wouldn’t it be great if the traditional mailing methods
were as easy and efficient as email?
Send an Email through the Postal Service
A few weeks ago, Wild Apricot reader Sharon Hurley Hall,
who lives in the Caribbean, asked for suggestions of an
email-to-snail-mail service. She needed to send a letter quickly to
someone in the United States — and there’s another good point: the
speed and reliability of mail delivery, especially across international
borders, can often be a concern. Sharon wanted to email her message directly to a point within the United States, where it could be printed out and mailed via US Postal Service to its destination.
Josh Catone’s detailed review of Postful
at ReadWriteWeb was the first resource to come to mind. The review was
written a year ago, but Postful continues to improve and add features; it ranks one of the first services
to check out— and you will, of course, want to send a test message
before relying on any new service in a crunch!
Three other email-to-post services that you may also want to check out: Email2Postal, NetGram, and PostalMethods. Not all services are "created equal" but it's, as always, a question of balancing out your budget with your communication needs. Here are a few features you may want to look for, depending on what your organization needs to accomplish and where the priorities lie:
- Ability to send PDF and MS Office or OpenOffice documents;
- High-quality print-outs;
- Quick turn-around time on printing and mailing your letters — ideally, within the same business day, or 48 hours at most;
- Personalization options, such as “real” stamps (instead of machine franking) and/or handwritten envelopes;
- Message tracking, and
- Confidentiality. Look for a strong privacy statement, and google the names of the services you're considering, to get a sense of their track records for customer satisfaction.
Advanced users with large-volume mailing lists might also want to
look for integration with your own list management software, and/or quantity discounts.
Every email-to-mail service has slightly different features, but the
price range for the basics would seem to be fairly consistent across the board — a one-page
letter to an address within the United States should cost you somewhere
between 69 cents and a dollar to send, depending in part on the amount of rich-text formatting that you can do or whether attachments are enabled. Beyond that, there'll be a small charge for each additional page; and color printing will cost extra. International letters (those destined for addresses outside the United States) carry a
surcharge, generally about 50 cents each, to cover the extra postage.
Personally, I think I've just lost my last excuse to be late with those thank-you notes to elderly offline relatives! What do you think?
Can you envision a circumstance when an email-to-mail service might
be useful for your organization’s print correspondence? Or perhaps
you’ve been using such a service for years… Either way, please leave a comment to share your thoughts.