How many hours are you and your team spending each month simply executing the tasks that keep your business running? If you’re like nearly every enterprise, big and small, the answer is “too many”! But that’s about to change. Automation has come to print mail, and it’s time to automate how you do business. From acquisition outreach to billing and payments, nearly all of those daily tasks could be running smoothly with little to no input from you. And all those niceties you thought you didn’t have time for, the welcome letters and thank you cards? Set them up once, and watch those new customer touchpoints boost your bottom line (without taxing your resources).
It’s time to get these essential but dreary tasks off your plate, so you can turn your attention to the growth and innovation you got into business for in the first place!
Let’s take a look at six ways Lob can help you automate your business:
When it comes to customer acquisition, direct mail is still one of the best tools out there. Industries like on-demand food delivery, personal finance, and real estate, and local services like car sharing, movers, and homecare, are leveraging its flexibility and reach to great success. On average, direct mail yields an ROI of 12:1! With our easy-to-integrate API, you can automatically generate mail based on customer actions or other event triggers—all without ever contacting another printer or mail house.
But automation doesn’t mean you’re stuck with static creative. In fact, the same API that backs Lob’s automation also supports HTML/CSS templates for fast and easy customization. With a single template, you can dynamically add names or personalized messages to your postcards, or incorporate customer-specific images or maps. And greater personalization equals higher conversions, as Lob clients like Munchery, Autopilot, and AmazonFresh have found.
Learn more about customized, event-triggered direct mail, and why it's making a major comeback in recent years.
If your business involves money—and odds are good that it does!—invoices, receipts, and other paperwork are a necessity. When you automate these essential documents, you’ll eliminate bottlenecks and let your team get back to growing the business, not just keeping it moving. That’s what Lob clients like health insurance provider Oscar have done, saving hours of employee time each month in the process. As you get back an hour here and two hours there, your aggregate time-savings will start to translate into a serious windfall, too.
But you need a specialized layout or perforations? We can handle that. Your mail has to be extra secure? Our Letters Service is HIPAA compliant from print to delivery.
Of course, you may not just be collecting money. Perhaps you’re issuing payment—and Lob can help with that, too. (In fact, we’ve already sent $70 million in checks, and counting, on behalf of clients like Move Loot, MY Pizza, and Square.) As with all of our products, our Simple Check Service supports flexible templates—add any branding, design elements, or special instructions you’d like—and includes intelligent mail tracking. And rest assured that we employ state-of-the-art security measures like colored backgrounds, watermarks, micro-printed borders, thermal ink, and Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) encoding to protect your documents at every step.
If you’re not reaching out to your customers with warm messages of thanks, you’re missing highly valuable opportunities to build loyalty and reduce turnover. There are plenty of occasions to connect: when a user makes a donation or signs up for your service, when she has an anniversary with your company, or even when she celebrates a birthday.
But as anyone who’s ever received a gift can attest, it’s not a smart move to keep track of thank-yous in your head! That’s even truer for a business—without a well-automated system, you’re left either reaching out to customers sporadically or awkwardly batching your communications. Lob solves that problem with event-triggered mail. Just set up the API to send your thanks based on certain customer actions, key dates, or even a specific period of inactivity. We’ll generate your mail automatically, without another input from you.
Whatever your business, whatever your voice, there’s an option that fits: Send a formal letter. Create your own greeting card. Or integrate with handwriting.io to dash off a friendly “handwritten” postcard. The most important thing is to simply say thanks.
When your business requires that people live where they say they live, print mail becomes an essential fraud-prevention tool. Simply send a postcard to the address a business or individual provided, complete with a unique activation code, as the final step in your registration process. Companies like Google Local, Bing Local, and Yelp are already executing this type of address verification to make their businesses more secure.
The unbeatable speed and customization of Lob’s API make it ideally suited to this task: Set up your template so a postcard is triggered the instant a customer submits an address—they’ll have it within a week, significantly lowering rates of abandonment. And HTML customization makes it fast and easy to add each client’s activation code to any postcard design.
In the age of email, it’s all too easy to ignore a digital reminder—even make it disappear with the click of a mouse. Boost your profits by reminding customers of outstanding payments with a physical letter. Lob’s API allows for total automation, making letters as fast and easy to send as email.
Passport, the industry’s leading provider of integrated cloud-based parking solutions, improved their bottom line—and their customers’—by automating collections with Lob. As part of their Citation Management service, Passport needed a way to handle letter generation for its parking provider clients. Since implementing Lob’s Simple Letter Service, Passport has provided higher collections yields to those clients—and saved over 2,400 FTE hours per year in the process.
Make your notices more impactful, while saving time and money, with automated letters.
Now imagine for a moment that your business has automated all of these key processes. That you can keep track of them all through a single dashboard—but never have to stuff another envelope. Where could you be spending your time instead?
Automation is one of our favorite things to talk about. Contact us to discuss strategies for saving your business time and money with Lob’s APIs.
