New Printing and Mailing Updates

Wow, can you believe we’re officially in Q4 of 2023?! I’m sure you’re like us where each year you think, “Where has the time gone?” but this year feels like it’s going especially fast…wouldn’t you agree? With that being said, we’ve made a lot of new updates to our website, along with printing and mailing updates and processes over the last few months (well years even but that’s a blog post for another day) and we wanted to share some of them with you.

What LetterStream’s Been Up to With Printing and Mailing Services

Let’s get into it, shall we? Let’s fill you in on what the mailing experts have been up to over here at LetterStream over the last few months.

Our production team is always busy serving up fast, perfect mail. Our customer support team is rocking it by giving nothing short of mad customer love. Our IT department just keeps making magic happen. Our marketing department has been revamping and reorganizing our online presence and our accounting team just keeps being awesome at what they do best.

Now, let’s get into the specifics of what we’ve been up to behind the scenes for you, our awesome clients, new and old to LetterStream. Keep in mind, we try to keep our updates subtle, so they don’t disrupt your normal processes when creating jobs to send your letters.

Quick Updates to Help You Send Mail Online Include:

Re-named #9 envelope overprint
Added the correct artwork/thumbnail for our flat-sized envelope
Turned on user-created endorsements for our flat-size envelopes
Improved access to our BAA (Business Associates Agreement) for HIPAA clients. We now use DocuSign to get our BAA to you and back in record time.

More In-Depth Updates

Let’s get into a bit more detail for some of the bigger updates we’ve been working on and have finally launched.

New Chatbot on LetterStream

We added a new chatbot to our website. This one we are super excited for and it’s going to help with quick answers to just about any question you may have.

Our new Chatbot is not like the others. It is an extremely fast, highly intelligent AI that can actually get you help faster than if you were talking to a human. Now, of course, our customer support is still available to provide mad customer love to our clients, but the Chatbot will help to answer most questions instantly.

Read all about our new Chatbot here.

FedEx 2Day

We did it, finally! We turned on FedEx 2Day letters for users that have been active for 6 months or more.

Currently, we offer the standard FedEx 2Day letter option. This will get your FedEx envelope delivered by 5 P.M. on the second business day from when it was mailed.

To learn more about the new FedEx 2Day or to see the step-by-step process on how to mail your documents via FedEx through our online portal, click here.

Improved Help Articles

Our customer support team has not only been busy providing customers with the best support possible, but they’ve also been busy improving some Help articles to make it easier to find questions to answers you might be looking for.

We have a plethora of articles that have recently been updated but here are a few to reference below:

Welcome to the Team!

We are beyond excited to announce that we recently added a new member to our customer support team who has been such an incredible asset to us. If you happen to reach out to support and get a reply from her, be sure to say hi! Welcome to the team, Morgan!

Well, that’s the not-so-quick update we have for you in regard to what’s been going on here at LetterStream lately. Keep in mind that we’re currently in the holiday season, so be sure to prepare accordingly for closures coming up. Here is an overview of the 2023 USPS (United States Postal Service) and LetterStream’s Holiday Schedule.

Should You Consider Outsourcing Mailing Projects?

I was working on a proposal this morning for a potential client and found myself pondering the benefits of outsourcing mail room operations and letter shop activities.

For those of you who would like a better printing and mailing solution but are hesitant to enter the world of outsourcing, consider the idea that you are already outsourcing many of your mission critical activities. Yes, that’s right. You are already outsourcing a tremendous amount of your business operations.

You are outsourcing the activities of keeping your money safe to your local bank. You are outsourcing all of your phone conversations to cell and telecom providers. You are outsourcing your electricity to the power company. Once you start thinking about it, the only things you don’t outsource are your core competencies… those things that provide uniqueness to your product and a competitive edge to your organization.

Still skeptical? Check out what other experts say… here’s a good article in Inc Magazine that supports our logic and might shed some additional light.

The question then becomes: Is printing and mailing your competitive advantage? Is folding and inserting what makes your company unique?

If you’d like to see what it might look like to outsource your printing and mailing activities to an organization as reliable as the local power company and probably more helpful than your banking institution please give us a call and let us show you how our unique and competitive solutions can help you focus more on yours.

Easy HOA Annual Meeting Notice Mailings

annual meeting notices

For Community Managers and Property Management Companies, annual meeting mailings are some of the most complex document sets that need to be mailed to homeowners.

The notice of annual meeting can include a variety of the following documents: cover letter, meeting agenda, draft budget, absentee ballot, community newsletter, ballot instructions, proxy, bios (biographical information) of candidates, community survey, stamped return envelope, and/or secret ballot envelope.

In addition to the different document types, most community managers ask that the proxy be printed on a colored sheet of paper, and the ballot on another. Sometimes there are special instructions from board members to print on both sides of the sheet of paper for some documents, and only print on one side for others.

For those of you who are responsible for the annual meeting packet for your HOA, you know just how crazy these mailings can get. However, for those of you who are already using LetterStream to create your annual meeting announcement, you can attest to just how fast and easy the process has become.

On the LetterStream website you can do the following:

Specify paper size and paper color per document
Specify 1-sided or 2-sided (simplex/duplex) printing per page
Specify black and white or full color printing per sheet
Include a return envelope with or without the homeowners return address pre-printed on it
Include a secret ballot envelope

What makes this process so easy is that most of the options are simply check boxes that need to be clicked to activate the options.

So whether your HOA annual meeting notices can go out in a standard size business envelope (#10), or require a large flat packet envelope, your mailing can be created online in a flash. If you are a bit skeptical, log in to www.letterstream.com and experiment with our mailing tools to see for yourself.

Your mailing can be created online without so much as a phone call or credit card swipe, and if you don’t like the online proofs, simply delete the job! (You’ll only have to pay for a job if you decide you want us to print and mail it).