Can DocuSend and DocuLink Help CFOs Save Companies from the Costly Ordeal of Stuffing Envelopes?

Reduce expenses: Have your employees take two to three minutes to upload your urgent mailings as opposed to taking hours to stuff envelopes manually.

Have you ever walked past an office or conference room occupied by well-compensated workers busily stuffing envelopes?

Preparing mail manually is an enormous expense for American businesses. Cost-conscious executives shake their heads in disbelief and wonder how this is still going on in the 21st century. Here's a brief explanation of why, even in highly efficient firms, it is still happening on a regular basis, and a solution for how to stop it and save plenty of your company costs.

Here’s What’s Going On

Whether your organization is outsourcing mail processing to a vendor or has an inner, captive shop that mails everything out, you have an established way to manage your mail that you're generally happy with for scheduled invoices and other communications sent regularly. Your documents already go out, so you’re all set…and then an unpredictable event triggers the need to urgently mail out a batch of documents: a product recall, shut off notices, a notice regarding an office change location, a branch closing, rate changes, moving, opening a new location, a change in hours, and so on. The number of some communications, for instance late notices, may change every month depending on the clients.

Often companies must internally handle such urgent mailings, even if they normally outsource, because there is not enough time to create the document, send it to a printing and mailing company, get the proofs back, and approve them before they are sent out. They have no choice but to lose all their automation and incur additional expenses. When a CFOs ask managers why skilled employees are being pulled from their assigned work to stuff envelopes, chances are they will hear something like: ''Because there is no better way to do it.''

Not true – not any more. Many managers simply are not aware of existing postal mail technology that can save US firms billions of dollars.

That means most organizations, regardless of the market they are in, feel that manually preparing documents for mailing is a necessary evil. Banks and credit unions stuff variable-rate change notices, medical and emergency care facilities stuff invoices and appointment confirmations, manufacturers stuff product recalls, and on and on. There are thousands of companies offering printing and mailing services, which of course includes stuffing envelopes. Some of the high-tech ones have websites where you can send the variable data and images for them to merge to create a document, but their prices are typically volume sensitive, and they may charge monthly minimums and setup fees.

Another drawback: With most of these services, there is the risk of sending them your data, which as we all know can end up in disaster if handled wrong. They'll do a complete print-to-mail service for you, but not without your precious data. And some print-to-mail services even require you to install a print driver, which can have devastating security consequences. There may be a few exceptions, but those will cost you.

And Here’s What to Do About It

We encourage you to benchmark all of the associated costs of these services, then compare them to DocuSend’s cloud-based mailroom.

DocuSend is in a class all by itself because it does not require data. The best way to protect your data is not to share it with anyone outside your organization. You can simply print your addressed documents to a PDF file and upload them to our secure website. Your documents will be printed at our facility and mailed within two business days starting at $1.23 per envelope, including postage, depending on what options you select. All documents are handled automatically without any approval process, as this technology allows you to take Word documents or files out of your accounting software, convert them to PDFs and print them just as they are, with all the variables included. That means your company does all the auditing ahead of time. You are not tied to contracted minimums of pieces, so you don’t need to accumulate a certain volume and can send any number you need to be printed and distributed for you as soon as possible, from a few documents to tens of thousands.

DocuSend simply extracts the mailing addresses from the PDF and makes them postal compatible. The mail is first-class automated, so it's already coded for the post office, making it as efficient as possible for the post office to deliver it.

So, if you are an executive or own a business that pays valuable employees to print and stuff documents because they are not aware that this technology exists, please visit our website or contact us. Using DocuSend’s cloud-based mailroom is every bit as fast and straightforward as sending an email, and much more secure.

DocuSend’s team of mailing experts can give professional help, as we have been in the mailing business for over 30 years. Besides the convenience of full automation, we provide a variety of useful complementary services and features:

Report Portal: Your personal portal offered by DocuSend to all users is a centralized platform where all mailing activities and expenses can be reviewed, unless you opt out by selecting our HIPAA feature. Users can easily navigate through the portal to look through their mailing history, resend documents, monitor delivery status of the documents and other useful information.

Address clean-up and NCOA Service: DocuSend's address clean-up and National Change of Address (NCOA) services plays a crucial role in maintaining address accuracy. By regularly updating and validating addresses against the most recent database, businesses can significantly reduce the chances of mail being undeliverable.

Tracking: The Mail Trail feature at no charge provides tracking of each mail item through the USPS system up to the final postal facility.

Feedback: Businesses can access comprehensive reports that detail aspects of their mailings such as cost, forwarded mail, undeliverable mail, etc., so they can optimize their mailing strategies and cost-effectiveness of their mailing campaigns.

Why not just use electronic media to send these event-triggered notices?

• One reason is that the content of these documents is often sensitive, and inadequate delivery attempts can have disastrous public relations consequences, some even ending up with legal repercussions.


• Other reasons include the fact that many businesses have databases containing records that lack verifiable email addresses, and roughly one third of American households are not even connected to the internet. But almost all of them have access to US Mail delivery.

Most CFOs will agree that there is an escalating number of choices to connect, share, read, inform, and communicate with each other. But which one is the most secure and deliberate when it comes to content-sensitive documents? Security is often cited as an underlying factor that makes “stuffing envelopes” still relevant in our high-tech world.

Think about it: Have you ever wondered if you should open an email attachment even though it looks like it's from your own bank? How about from a company you do business with? Or even a person you know? If you make the wrong decision about opening any document sent through the internet, you run the risk of infecting your system with a virus, or even having your identity compromised. And as the digital world expands, we are being inundated with more and more emails each year, and having to carefully screen them is taking more and more of our time. That's why the internet has become fertile ground for scammers to exploit our personal information. It's dirt cheap and very difficult to trace. How can the US enforce the existing laws when over 90% of cybercrime originates from foreign countries?

Now think of the worst-case scenario when you receive an envelope in your mailbox.

It's not going to corrupt your computer, drain your bank account, or ruin your credit. You can open it without thinking about who it came from and what trouble it might cause you. You may have to take the time to throw it in the recycling bin, but that's about as bad as it gets. This is one of the primary reasons many businesses use the US Postal Service to distribute sensitive documents.

There’s a better way to send electronic documents.

For those of your clients who opt for e-billing and e-statements, DocuSend’s DocuLink service allows you to send them, not as an attachment, but using a secure link without the expense of creating and maintaining your own secure portal. The document is never exposed to the internet, where cybercriminals lurk. A report is provided that shows you which documents have been opened.

What do you do with the unopened ones?

When you send a document with the DocuLink service but it is left unopened, you still have the option to send it by postal mail at the touch of a button, because all your files are securely stored in your personal portal for 6 months. You can even set parameters to have it automatically sent via USPS if it has not been opened after the number of days you determine.

That's how DocuSend can help CFOs save American businesses from the ordeal of stuffing envelopes by using the 21st-century technology our amazing staff has developed. Have your managers try it just once, and they will be thanking you for eliminating this tedious manual task forever. And you'll never have to walk past your employees stuffing envelopes at their desks instead of working on their core tasks, ever again.