Fun Burrito Postcard

Unique Thank You Postcard

I was walking through our facility and saw this postcard in our production department. I’m always fascinated by the creativity of our customers and enjoy seeing unique ways to communicate information.

This particular postcard jumped out at me as it had our company name on it. Who’d be sending a postcard with LetterStream printed on the front… other than a LetterStream employee?

Turns out one of our vendors bought us lunch (which was greatly appreciated) the same day that our new tech services manager started. Our new manager learned how easy it is to make postcards as well as created a fun and creative way to say “Thank You” at the same time!

To Share or Not To Share? That is the Question

Generally it is best to share, but by sharing your LetterStream login (email) with someone else you are limiting the communication we can have with that person.

We send emails to communicate the status of a job through our production process and if we have questions or quality concerns we may need to send an email to the owner of the account. If you share your login, we may not be able to communicate critical information, possibly leaving the job creator in the dark.

It is easy to set up new accounts and to add new users to a corporate account. So feel free to share this information with others in your company, but please don’t share your login information!

Who’s Faster? You or Us?

Sometimes we hear concern from mailing prospects on the east coast. Their concern is that it will take too long for mail created here in Scottsdale (Phoenix area), Arizona to make it back to the east coast.

This is a reasonable and logical concern, but we are pretty certain that our west coast mail can consistently make it back to the east coast and be delivered faster than east coast mail can.

Doesn’t make sense? Well, consider these points… When the post office is closed on the east coast, we generally have 2-3 extra hours, given the difference in time zones. We have tremendous print and mail capabilities, which means we can probably get the mail printed and inserted far faster than an in-house solution, improving our chances of getting the mail finished first.

Your jobs are not filler work for us, so we won’t put the job off to work on other projects (which we hear happens in some companies where printing and mailing isn’t their bread and butter), further improving our chances of getting the mail out at least one day faster than other companies.

And finally, the best part… our mail departs our facility after the local post office is closed, travels to a USPS acceptance facility, gets sorted to commercial airlines headed for the east coast and typically hits major east coast cities before the sun even comes up.  So, when someone is concerned about the speed of mail across the country, we simply say “West is Best!”.

A Unique Scanning Solution for Sending Certified Mail

Fax

We must admit, we like creating unique solutions for our customers.

A recent solution involved a client who was working with physical documents that needed to be re-mailed to individuals. Their documents were stamped with recording dates and were coming back from the county recorder’s office. These officially recorded documents needed to be mailed via Certified Mail to their clients and the task represented more work than they wanted to take on.

Our unique solution? We allowed them to create a cover sheet with the recipients’ address on it and then scan the document to us via their copier/scanner. Our software automatically received the document, read the address on the cover page and created the mailing. It worked well!

HIPAA Certified

HIPAA

HIPAA Certified. You might know what this is if you are in the medical and/or insurance field. It stands for The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It is a collection of rules that help govern the privacy of patient data and information.

Even if HIPAA doesn’t affect your organization directly, it does in a round-about way if you use LetterStream… mainly because we train our staff on HIPAA rules and follow them internally within our organization. The policies and procedures that we’ve put in place to protect private health information actually protect all our clients’ jobs.

So if you’re a law firm that sends class action lawsuit material or a pool cleaner who sends monthly statements, your information is guarded by the same tools and resources that we use for hospitals, medical offices and third-party administrators.

At the time of this blog post, 100% of our full-time employees and a portion of our part-time employees have passed HIPAA certification!

Envelopes Made with Wind Power?

Wind Power

We are always looking for ways to be a little more environmentally responsible in our printing and mailing practices, and we’ve found another good idea to implement. It is fun to talk about as well! You see, the bulk of our envelopes are now generated using wind power.

Quite often our customers don’t actually see the mail we send on their behalf, but if they did, they’d see a WindPower icon beside our SFI certification mark on the back of the envelopes we use. Cool!

We Strive to Over Communicate, You Can Too

Over Communicate

You might wonder about the term “over communicate.” We use the term quite often internally; not because we like senseless chatter, but because we think it is important to keep everyone informed of what is happening around them.

We probably tell some people things they don’t need to know and we probably get a little wordy when we train our staff, but we believe it is better to provide too much information than too little.  When everyone is in the loop and gets the big picture, we find that fewer mistakes and/or misunderstandings occur.

One of the ways we attempt to over communicate with our customers is through our email tools.  We send emails when someone establishes a new account, when we get a job, when we mail a job, when we hold a job, when we shred a job, if account balances fall below thresholds, if a job is ready for review, and probably a half a dozen other reasons.

Since we believe this is good for us to do internally and externally, we’ve created ways for you to over communicate with your team as well.  You can now let others know when you send a mailing, when a proof is ready for their review, and much more.

* Check out all our notification options by selecting “System Notifications” under the “My Account” section of the website.

CAI Trade Show in Las Vegas

LetterStream Homepage

We just returned from a trip to Las Vegas for the 2012 National CAI Trade Show.

This show was the debut of our new booth and newly redesigned brochures. We enjoyed seeing many of our customers at this show; it’s always great fun to hear how we liberate them from the folding and stuffing process of getting a mailing out the door.

It was great to see the traction of our mail-making API. Several of the software companies attending were already displaying the LetterStream partner logo and many others expressed interest in connecting to our servers via the API in order to send postcards, first-class mail and certified mail.

Currently we have partners consisting of community management software companies, collection companies, legal document prepares and large certified mail senders integrating with us.

Follow this link to learn more about the LetterStream API

Always Learning…

Our customers are always surprising us with new and inventive ways to use our products.

Here are a couple great ideas:

  1. Save money with postcards. Some of our property management customers have found that they can save a fair bit of money by using postcards to present first violation notifications.
  2. Simple thank you’s go a long way. Those same property management customers use postcards to send simple “Thank You” notes to those residents that are doing a great job keeping their yards spic-and-span. A great, inexpensive way to let residents know that they are appreciated.

Give it a try!…

 

Create and send postcards with LetterStream

Hello world!

inc5000

Well, LetterStream.com has come a long way and we have our loyal customers and outstanding employees to thank.

Thanks to them, we have made the INC Magazine 5000 list for 2011!

We always strive for continued improvement, and as part of that we are releasing a revamped website along with this new blog. We hope you’ll add your email address on the right side of this page and follow our random thoughts about printing, mailing, software development and whatever else comes to mind (you might just see some recipes, musings about music or maybe some fishing tips from some of our talented employees).

Thanks again for supporting us and we look forward to continued mutual success!