How to Write a Return Address on Letter to Increase Deliverability?
For some businesses, it is effortless to communicate with their customers. It comes naturally to them. However, there are businesses for whom communication is the biggest challenge, and Utility Companies are one of them.
The main reason is nothing is enticing about the product they are selling. Secondly, it is hard to convey information or ensure quality customer service for utility companies. Why? Because you can not advertise utility products via Google Ads or social media.
Furthermore, the printing of utility bills and statements is under strict government regulations. Due to these limitations, utility companies should outsource their utility bill printing and mailing. Outsourcing can help you overcome these limitations in utility bill printing and mailing. Apart from this, outsourcing utility bill printing and mailing has numerous other advantages.
So, if you run a utility company and are unsure about utility bill printing and mailing services, you should keep reading. As we advance, we will discuss the various advantages of utility bill printing and mailing, types of utility bills, and more.
Advantages of Utility Bill Printing and Mailing Services
The process of processing, printing, and delivering statements is neither easy nor fast. Hence, it is not uncommon to see utility company customers complain about delays in utility bill delivery.
The delays in delivering utility bills and statements on time are the different stages involved in the process. Also, each of these stages requires a lot of effort and professional expertise. Outsourcing utility printing and mailing services can be a massive help as they can easily organize the process for you.
- You can delegate every responsibility and task. You can start from the design to delivering your utility bill to an outsourcing company.
- Experts in direct mail printing and distribution, such as PostGrid, have access to advanced printing equipment.
- Direct mail outsourcing companies like PostGrid have tie-ups with the USPS. Hence, PostGrid can cover your mailing services.
- You can use different types of advanced and automated direct mail regardless of the utility service you sell.
Cost-Efficiency
The most significant advantage of using utility bill printing and mailing services is it’s incredibly cost-effective. With the help of utility printing and mailing services such as PostGrid, you can optimize your mailing process.
This optimization spreads to every aspect of the direct mail process, from the cost of materials to storage and delivery. Furthermore, direct mail systems like PostGrid even offer an address verification API. As a result, you can practically get rid of return mails and minimize wastage and expenses.
Better Customer Service
Delayed delivery of the print utility bill is the number one complaint customers have about utility companies. However, it is also true that an overwhelming 91% of consumers prefer printed bills over digital ones.
According to the billing data analysis by the USPS, even among the newest utility customers, 89% prefer the print utility bill. This group of customers is highly tech-savvy, and yet they choose a printed format for their bills.
Every customer wants the printed utility bill. But, the problem is with delivering them without delays. Using a fully automated system like PostGrid can cut errors and streamline the direct mail process. It can even help you optimize the direct mail delivery for USPS.
Regulatory Compliances
As you know, the government strictly regulates utility bill printing and mailing. The need for such strict regulations is that utility bills are considered sensitive documents. This is because they contain the personal details of the customer. Therefore, such personal details must always be kept private.
Hence federal and state laws regulate the processing of such documents or sensitive data. So, unless you are well aware of these laws or compliances, you should not dive straight into utility bill printing and mailing.
Service providers such as PostGrid already come equipped with all the necessary utility bill printing and mailing compliance. And since outsourced services like PostGrid ensure data privacy and law obedience, you can remain carefree.
Concentrate Your Focus on The Business
Utility bill printing and mailing is not easy, and as we have already mentioned, it takes a lot of time and effort. Outsourcing utility bill printing and mailing means you don’t have to put in long hours or extra effort. Hence you can save valuable time and resources.
You can then direct this additional time, effort, and even resources to focus on the more essential aspects of your business. Therefore, you can efficiently utilize this time to optimize your processes and provide better customer service.
Types of Utility Bills
Sometimes new companies are unsure whether they need utility bill services. Businesses must consider every minor aspect of the process involved. They must keep in mind that utility documents are primarily connected to the resources they can provide to the customer’s household. It could be water, electricity, gas, and so on.
But, not all resources provided to a household need to be classified as a utility. Hence we have listed all the primary utility services that a company can offer to its customers. Check the utility bills listed below to determine whether your company also requires printing and mailing utility bills.
- Electricity bills
- Water and sewage bills
- Gas bills
- Trash and recycling bills
- Internet bills
- Telephone or landline bills
It is always best for utility companies to outsource their utility bill printing and mailing. By outsourcing the process, you can save loads of time and money. But, more importantly, you can have peace of mind as you no longer have to worry about complex compliances or extensive mailing processes.
Utility printing and mailing services can help you send different kinds of documents. For example, you can print and mail invoices, late notices, transactional forms, and much more.
You can cover all your mailing needs with a service provider like PostGrid and save even more time and resources for your business.
- Monthly bills and statements
- Late payment notices
- Rate increase letters
- Customer welcome letters
- Shut-off notices
- Service cancellation letters
- Transactional receipts
- Newsletters
- Announcement letters
How Does Utility Bill Printing and Mailing Services Help You Boost Your Collections?
Utility Bill Printing and Mailing Services for Electric, Gas, and Water Companies
PostGrid’s direct mail services allow utility companies to complete bill designing, printing, and mailing in one place. They can benefit from
Selective Messaging on Bills and Utility Statements
Your monthly statements can become more than transactional documents.
Our trans-promotional mailing capabilities allow you to print marketing messages on your statements, helping you achieve two goals simultaneously.
You can advertise your services while facilitating speedy payments by sending branded bills to your clients. Such trans-promotional mailings let you save costs and offer added value to your business!
PostGrid also allows you to avail of variable data printing (VDP). It lets you create visually appealing, personalized statements to make an impact and boost your brand image.
Employing VDP makes your bills and statements more engaging and motivates clients to subscribe to more services!
Incorporate Custom, Data-Driven Graphics
Incorporating personalized graphics into your transactional mailers helps you stand out from other items your clients might receive.
Thus, it increases the chances that clients will view your bills and make speedy payments.
High-Quality Printing
Utility companies must send mailers with high-quality prints to ensure recipients pay attention to their messages and complete the CTA at the earliest.
Luckily, PostGrid works with reputed printing partners who can help you achieve this goal. We allow you to send mail with crisp graphics, high-resolution fonts, and appealing touches.
Optimize Your Document’s Whitespace
Whitespace is the space between your bill’s words, images, tables, and other elements. It ensures your document doesn’t look messy and confuse readers.
Also, it helps you maintain professionalism when drafting documents, letting readers understand what you want to convey.
Whitespace management is a crucial part of utility bill printing.
Employing utility printing and mailing services enables you to manage the whitespace in your documents and print easy-to-understand bills.
Effective and Streamlined Utility Bill Printing with PostGrid’s Direct Mail Services
Direct mail is among the best channels for public utility vendors to advertise their services and inform clients about special rates, exclusive product offers, and other details.
It helps you engage and retain customers and stay top of mind.
Our direct mail solutions help you connect with your existing and potential customers via many mailer formats, like postcards, letters, flyers, and newsletters. Also, you get countless features, including variable data printing, retargeting, custom mailing lists, an online dashboard, and marketing integrations.
Let us dig deep into our features below:
Postage Optimization
PostGrid helps utility businesses get the lowest postage prices with attractive discounts. We take many steps to ensure you don’t pay postal surcharges and other fees.
Our services include mail presorting, address verification, and Certified Mail tracking. Our solutions cross-check your mailing lists against the USPS CASS database to verify whether the delivery addresses are valid and accurate. Otherwise, we make the necessary corrections, helping you accurately deliver your bills, statements, and invoices.
We rely on Delivery Point Validation (DPV) data to predict and improve your mailing deliverability. PostGrid also leverages National Change of Address (NCOA) processing to ensure your records are updated!
Document Folding and Inserting
Imagine you want to send 1,000 bills simultaneously. You would instruct your staff to print, fold, and stuff them into envelopes. Also, they would need to complete many other tasks, like
- Sticking address labels,
- Affixing stamps,
- Assembling the envelopes, and
- Taking them to the Post Office.
The list goes on! Hence, PostGrid’s utility printing and mailing services enable you to complete your tasks online. All you need to do is integrate our API into your CRM to get started!
Automating your bill print and mail processes helps you cut manual mistakes. It ensures that you never compromise on the quality and accuracy of your mailers.
Engage Customers With Educational Inserts
PostGrid lets you send marketing and informative inserts with your utility bills. You can use them to educate customers about
- Different ways to contact your support center
- Green initiatives regarding bill handling
- Opportunities for winning rebate credits
- Sending feedback
- Online and offline bill payment options
You can use our direct mail API or dashboard to ship postcards, letters, or newsletters as marketing inserts with your bills. It optimizes your costs and helps your customers stay updated. Additionally, it ensures you are always connected with your audience, encouraging them to continue using your services!
Send Timely Bills and Get Paid Faster
Sending your utility bills accurately and speedily is vital to your revenue flow.
It ensures your customers receive their bills on time and completes the payments before the due date. They might file complaints if your mailers fail to arrive in time at their homes or offices.
Hence, using speedy utility bill printing and mailing services is the need of the hour!
PostGrid offers a 2-business day SLA, guaranteeing your bills or statements are ready and out the door soon after you place an order.
We also add Intelligent Mail Barcodes (IMBs) to your mailers, enabling you to track your mail as they move throughout the USPS infrastructure.
Our real-time tracking capabilities let you stay updated and follow up with customers promptly! You can also automate a follow-up campaign to remind those not paid after the due date.
Triggered, On-Demand, and Bulk Mailing
Triggered mailings help you send something to a customer based on their actions. For instance, imagine someone requesting you send them a copy of their last month’s bill via your website. A trigger-based campaign lets you automatically ship the relevant item to the customer.
PostGrid allows you to conduct triggered campaigns via API integrations, wherein you incorporate our solutions into your CRM or other tools.
Also, we help you send on-demand or bulk mailings, allowing you to be flexible. You can send one or a million bills simultaneously using our platform.
Consumer Response Tracking
Our all-inclusive utility bill printing and mailing services help you add custom QR codes and pURLs to your mailers. These elements can redirect consumers to your website to complete their payments.
And you can collect data on who visited the payments page, helping you determine the success of your mailings.
Helpful Customer Service and Competitive Prices
PostGrid’s customer assistance team is available for you 24 x 7 every day. Hence, you can contact us anytime for technical or other help.
Also, PostGrid charges you only for the mail you send. You don’t need to pay hidden fees, surcharges, or minimum monthly charges.
Our flexible pricing allows all utility businesses to sign up and use our utility bill printing and mailing solutions without burning holes in their pockets.
Data Transfers
Our API integrations facilitate data exchange between PostGrid and your favourite billing tools and platforms. Thus, you can quickly transfer customer records to and fro from your system, making sending personalized bills a breeze!
Also, our encryptions, user permissions, and other security measures allow you to maintain privacy and confidentiality.
PostGrid’s utility printing and mailing services can benefit these companies:
- Electricity providers
- Sewer service providers
- Electric Companies
- Natural gas
- Waste management services
- Internet and cable service providers
- Home security solutions
- Gas Companies
- Water companies
- Internet and telephone providers
- Trash and recycling companies
- Water and sewage companies
Improve Customer Engagement Using Utility Bill Design Tools
You must follow the best practices for utility bill design and generation to give your statements a formal and authentic look.
You must focus on your bill’s layout, content, and quality, which helps maintain your brand reputation.
Please follow these tips to design appealing and authentic public utility bills and statements:
Use a Formal Layout
Your marketing and transactional documents should look different from each other. Thus, choose a simple yet official-looking layout for your bills that you can follow for a long time.
You can add infographics, like tables, graphs, pie diagrams, etc., to convey the customer’s usage data.
Stick to Your Brand’s Colors
Using colours from your branding palette only to design your documents is best. It creates trust and brand recognition among customers who expect to get similar bills every month.
A broad change can throw them off. Thus, maintaining a specific branding is essential.
Add All the Necessary Elements
Your utility bills must have specific elements, like
- Announcements about rate changes, mandates, and new initiatives
- A section on resource-saving practices and technologies
- Details on the latest efficiency programs
- Payment options
- Last and current months’ usage
- Incentives and redeemable points
- Rebates
Try using the same templates monthly to be consistent and keep up with your quality standards.
Ensure Zero Errors
Your bills must have zero typos, misspellings, spacing errors, capitalization issues, and other mistakes.
Even a minor mistake can make customers question your brand and switch to competitors’ services.
Thus, please pay attention to your templates and the information you add. Fortunately, PostGrid helps you automate bill creation via its API integrations, wherein you can automatically fetch and fill out your customers’ details. It reduces errors and saves time and effort!
Use High-Quality Imagery and Fonts
Many bills have images and fancy fonts that give them a distinct and engaging look. But they can do more harm than good if they are blurred or of low quality.
These minor details broadly affect customer retention rates, payment flow, and overall business.
Try using PostGrid’s utility bill printing and mailing to streamline your processes and reduce in-house work. It helps you be present for your customers more than handling print tasks and logistics!
Utility Bill Printing + Digital Integrations
PostGrid lets you connect our print and mail features with your existing marketing and operational tools. You can connect your offline bill mailings with text and email marketing campaigns.
For example, imagine you want to email your customers the same day the envelope arrives at their doorsteps. You want to reinstate your message and prompt them to complete the payment as soon as possible to earn a small discount.
Our API integrations facilitate multi-channel campaigns, allowing you to engage customers on different channels and streamline your collections strategy.
Also, you can
- Reinforce your messages
- Provide additional payment options to customers
- Send automated payment reminders
- Mail regular updates
- Expand your outreach
- Improve brand visibility
These benefits make using PostGrid’s API integrations more reasonable because you can stay connected with your audience everywhere while sending timely bills for faster payments.
Steps to Print and Mail Utility Bills Via PostGrid
Not long ago, direct mail was sluggish, expensive, untrackable, and poorly targeted.
Businesses can now use automated direct mail solutions, which is the opposite. It is easier, faster, affordable, and trackable!
A cloud-based software or dashboard allows utility businesses like yours to connect with your data whenever needed. It reduces human errors and helps maintain a single database for all devices or campaigns.
This new method lets you log into your account and avail of utility bill printing and mailing services based on your needs.
Below is an overview of how to log into PostGrid’s dashboard and send your utility bills:
Step 1: Log into your PostGrid account using your secure credentials. If you don’t already have an account, sign up here.
Step 2: You can upload your mail design or use one of our invoice templates to create your bills.
Step 3: Upload your mailing list, which we verify on the spot to check for accuracy and validity. You can add your variable data to this list, helping us personalize your bills or statements.
Step 4: Add your return mailing address to ensure the Post Office sends the bills back if delivery fails. Then, you can select the shipping option, like First-Class, Registered, or Certified Mail. Also, choose the date when you want to initiate your utility bill mailings.
Step 5: We print and mail your bills on your behalf. You don’t need to negotiate prices with your local printing firm or manually stick stamps to every envelope.
Step 6: You can get real-time updates about your campaign’s progress. Also, you can track your mailers via your dashboard.
Step 7: Analyze your utility printing and mailing campaigns by accessing timely reports and insights.
You can get more detailed information on printing and mailing utility bills with PostGrid here.
Why Do You Need PostGrid’s Automated Utility Bill Printing and Mailing Services?
Consistency is a significant aspect that separates marketing mail from utility bill mailing. The importance of consistency in utility bill printing and mailing is far more critical than in direct mail campaigns.
You can change the consistency of sending marketing campaign mailers if you have to. But, when it comes to utility bills, there is much less flexibility. You must deliver the mail within a specific time, or your customers may end up paying the price for it.
Specify The Time For Utility Bill Printing And Mailing
As you know, you must send utility bills within a specific time. Furthermore, you must repeat the process on a timely basis. It could be weekly, monthly, bimonthly, and so on. You can easily specify this time gap and automate the utility bill printing and mailing by using PostGrid.
Establish a Long-Term Relationship & Impact Your Business
Try to establish a long-term relationship with your print utility bill service provider. Having a long-term partner like PostGrid can impact your business. It will enable you to access the latest functionalities and capabilities they offer. By doing so, you can always stay a step ahead of your competitors.
Real-Time Notifications
Advanced utility printing and mailing services give you real-time notifications of print utility bill delivery. The constant updates make it easy to ensure that your customers get the top-quality service they deserve.
As a result, you also get superior control over the statement document processing. In addition, you can further identify patterns in print utility mail delivery using advanced insights. For example, you can find delivery routes that take more time than others. You can then send the mailers on that route earlier to avoid late bills.
Integrate With Your CRM
One of the best things about using advanced utility printing and mailing services like PostGrid is automation. However, some of you might wonder whether automation can take away the personalized touch of the mailer. With a solution like PostGrid, you can integrate your CRM into their system.
By doing so, tools like PostGrid can access your customer list and personalize every print utility bill you send out. Therefore, you can easily print the name, address, and any other customer details on the utility bill and statements. Furthermore, PostGrid integrates with all major CRMs.
24-Hour support
As far as utility printing and mailing services are concerned, PostGrid has one of the best support you can find. With 24-hour support capability, PostGrid ensures that you never have to worry about being left to fend for yourself.
Furthermore, PostGrid uses advanced technology to ensure that you don’t experience any trouble once you integrate it into your website. PostGrid has a team of experts on standby to help you with any issue regarding their system. So, you can ensure that your utility bills are always on time.
Track Consumer Response
Another significant advantage of choosing PostGrid as your utility printing and mailing service is its powerful tracking capability. You can use PostGrid’s system to track consumer response to critical documents through its advanced integration.
The customer analytics tool enables you to track the performance of your direct mail delivery. It means you can follow the effectiveness of your direct mail campaigns and streamline your strategy. You can also use the data to optimize your internal operations and deliver better customer service.
Ensure Deliverability Via Address Verification API
PostGrid offers one of the best address verification APIs in the world. You can integrate PostGrid’s address verification API into your website and get the most out of it. It includes bulk address verification capabilities that enable you to ensure the deliverability of your print utility bill.
Checking the validity of the addresses using USPS’s official address database is just the start. You also get additional features. One such feature is the Address Autocomplete which automatically fills the addresses as the user types them in. Such a feature dramatically simplifies the form-filling process and gives more power to the user.
Conclusion
Utility bill printing and mailing can become complex considering the long list of rules and compliances it has to follow. Therefore, it is no wonder that more businesses rely on utility bill printing and mailing services.
You can save valuable time by outsourcing the utility bill printing and mailing process to reliable partners like PostGrid. It is also highly convenient. Service providers like PostGrid enable you to automate utility bill printing and mailing fully.
You can connect PostGrid’s advanced solution with your CRM to send personalized utility bills to your customers. Furthermore, you can even schedule when the utility bills and other documents should be sent to the customer. As a result, you can fully optimize your print utility bill delivery for your business.
