Those who send one or two postcards to their friends and family rarely think about print software. They purchase ready-made mailpieces and perceive them as a nice Christmas or birthday greeting for their loved ones.

When direct mail becomes a part of a marketing or offline customer communication strategy, the rules of the game change. Marketers and business owners start to look for ways to optimize mail marketing, customer retention and communication campaigns by making them more cost-efficient.

Many decide to do all mailing chores and presorting on their own. They lose a lot of time researching how to send a batch file to print to network and ship the produced mail at the lowest rate. Others use batch printing software and mail automation for integrated direct mail campaigns.

Want to boost your mail marketing & offline communication efforts? Join the second group.

To give you a better perspective on how to handle large mailing volumes, today we’ll talk about batch printing software. Keep reading to find out:

• Benefits of using batching for mail printing and delivery
• 3 approaches to batching: sending a batch file to print to network manually, hiring a printing vendor, or full automation
• Inkit’s batch printing software for integrated direct mail and advanced automation

Key Benefits of Batch Printing for Your Business

Before getting to the practical subtleties of massive mail printing, let’s clarify what we mean here. In the mail production industry, batching is mostly used for a batch of print tasks completed at the same time. For example, you design five different types of postcards targeting diverse audiences. Printing all of them separately, you may lose several cents per each mail piece, which is a huge waste. By putting all the postcards in one batch file, you save your budget and increase operational capacity.

Batch-based mail production is an optimum solution for SMEs and large enterprises that run regular mail campaigns. In addition, such an approach is essential for financial, healthcare, and other official institutions that send large volumes of communication letters. Even under quarantine conditions, they are required to print documents and safely organize the delivery.

Batch mail production and shipment can also cut your expenditures in several other ways:

• Benefit from the discounts offered by the United States Postal Service for presorted mail (mail tied to the same ZIP code). Batching helps to concentrate within a single or several postal areas, which means that the USPS doesn’t have to use mechanical sorting. Thus, the better your mail is sorted, the lower postal rate you enjoy.
• Mail the related documents, such as household bills, together. This will both help you to save on envelopes as well as cut the cost of postage.
• Reduce the number of manual processes within your company to focus on the most critical tasks. With batch printing software, teams can either quickly send a batch file to print to network or fully automate mailing and delivery.

Note that batching doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to produce mail in large volumes. It’s all about creating the sequence of diverse printing tasks in one batch that automatically runs without assistance.

3 Approaches to Batching: Manual Sending a Batch File to Print to Network, Printing Vendor, and Full Automation

Сompanies that use batch print usually establish a uniform process to automatically print documents and communications. They handle tons of pdf, doc, docx, and other txt files, trying to minimize costs and make printing equally easy for every team.

Therefore, a large share of businesses chooses to either have in-house printing equipment (configured and maintained independently) or to hire a printing service provider. There are also those that take a step further and automatically print files through API services. Let’s take a closer look at each integrated direct mail option to find out which will be the best fit for your company.

Manual Sending a Batch File to Print to Network

With digitalization and the emergence of cloud solutions, there is no need to print as many text files as before, but most offices still use printers. And the higher everyday printing volume, the more powerful printing equipment they invest in. Such network printers are connected within the same system. Thus, any team member with the corresponding access can manually send a batch file to print to network. Once the printer driver receives the print command, it adheres to the sequence configured in the batch file. As a result, the hardware produces mail pieces and documents with optimized performance, whereas employees don’t need to process every txt file separately.

Outsourcing Print to a Third-Party Vendor

As the demand for quality and secure printing grows, the market comes up with more and more relevant offers. Those companies that don’t want to purchase pricey equipment and maintain it at premises can fully outsource their printing. In this case, they will also send a batch file to print to network but with one key difference – network printers are located outside of the office. Once the provider’s batch printing software completes fulfilling the batch, the mail pieces and documents are delivered to the outsourcer. After that, the customer company will need to organize and manage mail shipments on its own.

Batch Printing Software for Full Automation

The third solution for mail batching and large volume production can run advanced print commands. It fully automates every stage of the mailing cycle, from initiating printing to delivery and tracking. A company subscribes to web batch printing software and connects it to the currently used CRM or marketing platform. After that, integrated direct mail becomes a part of a large-space marketing or communication campaign and mailing. Thanks to this, the batch printing software is automatically triggered to launch mail printing and delivery upon a specific event. For example, when someone’s credit card information expires, the system automatically tracks this, initiates the print of a postcard reminder, and automatically sends an order for mailing to inform this customer about the need to update their payment details.

Inkit is a batch printing software solution that allows you to automatically produce and deliver mail pieces. You can use it for integrated marketing campaigns or for printing multiple files of official communications. Find more about how it works below.

Inkit’s Batch Printing Software for Integrated Direct Mail and Advanced Automation

Inkit’s API integrations platform is designed to smoothly connect offline communications with online resources. You can use a single API to collect all data in one place and empower different teams to access it. This makes their efforts better coordinated since everyone can view details on integrated direct mail delivery and effectiveness. For instance, if a sales rep sees that Inkit will complete printing and shipment in 2 days, they may decide to wait for the response before calling the recipients.

As to batching, there are two things you need to know about Inkit:

• We automatically form batches on our side, so you don’t have to worry about your integrated direct mail campaigns. Just subscribe to Inkit and connect it with your CRM or database. The batch printing software will automatically handle printing and delivery once you click the Send button or a trigger event happens across one of the connected channels.
• We don’t impose any limitations on the batch size. This means you can print anything from a single postcard to thousands of utility bills.

Want to enjoy the benefits of batch printing software with maximum flexibility? Start using Inkit’s integrated direct mail platform now.