The Benefits of Hybrid Mail for Direct Marketing

Posted on 11th March 2011 in Articles

One of the fastest growing areas of direct mail fulfilment and delivery is that of Hybrid Mail. This new technique allows senders to mail personalised mailers more efficiently and offers a number of benefits for small businesses.

Hybrid Mail senders upload their letter and address data to an external provider, often through an online interface. The letter is then mail merged and printed remotely with unique address data, sorted and delivered straight into the postal system often at a local level.

As mail is sent more efficiently and in bulk, the Hybrid Mail provider can achieve significant discounts on postage costs which it can pass on to its customers. Hybrid Mail therefore offers a range of benefits to users sending direct marketing campaigns:

  • Cost benefits: Outsourcing printing and fulfilment achieves cost savings in print and postage costs, even for smaller scale mailings.
  • Environmental benefits: Hybrid Mail reduces the carbon footprint of businesses at a time when direct marketing needs to be environmentally friendly.
  • Time benefits: Outsourcing to Hybrid Mail reduces the call on resources.
  • Marketing benefits: Hybrid Mail gives better production quality and allows better targeting down to a more granular level.

All the above can help organisations to create competitive advantage. In July 2010 Ian Davidson, vice president of Pitney Bowes DMT International, was quoted as saying “only through intelligent integration of print and mail can organisations truly be said to be achieving maximum efficiency, maximum quality and maximum return on investment with their customer communications.”

Hybrid Mail appears to provide a natural fit with the Selectabase range of direct marketing lists and direct mail packages, any of which are delivered monthly in smaller batches which are ideal for fulfilling through Hybrid Mail. Therefore we are ourselves researching hybrid mail solutions with the aim of offering a complete data and mailing services to our small business clients in the future.