Beyond postage discounts, there are many reasons tracking your mail can help your company. Ask yourself these 10 questions to determine how your company can benefit from securing a mail tracking service.

1. Are you set up to capture postal data now?

There are valuable data points that can be of use if you choose to track your mail. Once you begin to do so, you gain access to information you didn’t realize is available. Notifications can be easily set up and automated to inform you of one or several updates about the journey of a mail piece to its intended destination.

2. Do internal departments ask about where their client’s mail is?

When you track mail, the data available to you provides updates, including:

● Daily or weekly delivery date projections to help your call center

● Real-time status of a mail piece while in transit

● Delivery problems such as system delays, weather events, or a lost piece of mail that may affect Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

● Status on in-home delivery dates to ensure proper timing for campaign in-home window targeting effectiveness

3. Do you have regulatory compliance tied to your mail delivery?

Understanding the USPS postal guidelines is difficult, especially if mailing campaigns are just one of your many responsibilities. A mail tracking service can shoulder the burden of managing these guidelines and help ensure that you remain compliant.

Every mailing can have different requirements. Mail tracking provides visibility into each mailing so you can understand if you have an issue with compliance. This insight is helpful when you want to confirm if your credit card statements are delivered within the required period to comply with your business and industry standards. You can automate mailing status updates and provided reports directly to departments as needed. Mail tracking is also of value in providing valuable data to your compliance teams for audit trails when required.

4. Do you need postal data to improve your operations?

Mail tracking can help your operations beyond updates about an individual mail piece being delivered. You gain the ability to understand the trends of your vendors and the movement of your mail. You can also spot issues that may jeopardize meeting your SLAs.

5. Do you use multiple suppliers and want to have better access to measuring their performance?

Mail tracking can give you visibility into the performance of each of your suppliers that can be used to improve the efficiency of your suppliers and help you better manage your relationships.

6. Are you maintaining the uniqueness of your IMbs?

Maintaining the uniqueness of the Intelligent Mail barcode (IMb) is often underestimated by most mailers. Doing so ensures you continue receiving communications from the USPS on the correct client or customer. The USPS requires maintaining the uniqueness of the IMb for 45 days; however, the best practice is to do so for a year, minimum.

If you have multiple vendors, mail tracking services can transfer the responsibility of maintaining IMb uniqueness over to its own system.

7. Would your accounts receivable department appreciate information about when payments are sent back and where they are going?

Mail tracking of inbound mail provides you visibility into those pieces coming back to you for cashflow purposes if they contain payments and scheduling staff availability to open incoming mail.

8. Do you receive a lot of return mail?

Tracking your mail gives you electronic access to your return mail information. Mail tracking services translate that return mail data into a language easily understood by companies so their databases can be updated and ultimately help improve overall customer communications and satisfaction.

9. Do you have any mail pieces that may be susceptible to fraud?

Tracking your valuable mail, such as credit cards, payments, and contracts, should be required. Using the delivery event scan data can then help your company reduce fraud related to these mail pieces. By tracking, you will know if the USPS has redirected a mailpiece to another address while in the delivery process.

10. Do you often have clients calling in to see where their mail is?

With a mail tracking service in place, you gain access to view specific event scans for an individual mail piece. Your call center can use this system, providing them and the client/customer with valuable insight into the mail piece location and status. You can also proactively use delivery event scan data to alert clients via text or email that their mail is on the way, reducing call center volume and providing a better experience for your customer.

Moira Mach is Director of Client Operations for GrayHair Software. Having joined in 2013, she oversees all aspects of client and vendor integration, and ensuring client satisfaction. Samantha Ewald is a Client Success Manager at GrayHair Software. She helps clients produce best-in-class results by enhancing mailing programs, optimizing customer communications, and navigating USPS regulations.

To learn more about mail tracking, visit grayhairsoftware.com.