Market Trends
What is a lettershop? Services, processes and benefits explained clearly
A lettershop gets your mailing ready for dispatch: printing, personalising, enveloping and posting with optimised postage. This is how it works and how it benefits your business.
TOPIC
Mailing services
WHO WE HELP
Tourism, agencies & retail
READING TIME
4 minutes
FOCUS
Packaging
Do you want to send a personalised letter to 5,000 customers, complete with a voucher, flyer and reply card? Then you do not need a team of interns with folding bones, but a lettershop.
A lettershop is a service provider that prepares your mailings for dispatch, from the print file right through to postal delivery. It handles all the steps between the printer and the postman: personalising, folding, enveloping, addressing, sorting and franking. The name comes from the English words "letter" and "shop", in the sense of a workshop.
Lettershops work mechanically and in large quantities. What would take days in an office and be prone to errors is completed there in just a few hours, cleanly documented and at a fraction of the cost.
From our lettershop directly into the hands of your guests and customers.
What services does a lettershop offer?
A modern mailing house covers the entire lifecycle of your mailshot. Typical services include:
Address cleansing: Removing duplicates, verifying postcodes and spelling, and matching changes of address. Every incorrect address costs postage and achieves nothing.
Personalisation: Names, salutations, customer numbers or individual codes are printed directly onto the letter, card or envelope using laser or inkjet printing.
Folding and cutting: Letters, flyers and folders are mechanically trimmed to format.
Enclosing: Letters, inserts and reply cards are placed in the envelope in the correct order. Modern systems use cameras to check that every envelope contains exactly what it is supposed to.
Polywrapping: Catalogues and magazines are wrapped in film, complete with inserts if required.
Addressing and franking: The address and postage mark are applied directly to the envelope or the film wrap.
Sorting and dispatch: Mailings are sorted in accordance with postal regulations and handed over to the postal service in bundles.
TESTIMONIALS
What our clients say
SALU HOME
"Particularly since we have focused entirely on the online shop, the reliability and fast delivery times have become invaluable to us."
Anna & Sarira Krüger
Co-Founder & Creative Director
How a lettershop mailing campaign works
Briefing: You define the target audience, circulation, format, inserts and dispatch date.
Data and material: You supply address data and print files, or ready-printed material.
Data validation: The lettershop cleanses your addresses and reconciles them with postal specifications.
Production: Personalisation, folding, inserting or poly-wrapping.
Quality control: Random checks and camera-based inspections ensure that everything is correct.
Postage optimisation and lodgement: The mailpieces are sorted and lodged with the postal service at the most favourable applicable rate.
Envelope inserting system in action: Automated processing for the fast, precise and efficient dispatch of high-volume mailings.
Who can benefit from using a lettershop?
Essentially for anyone who regularly sends post or does so in larger quantities. Typical examples include customer mailings and voucher campaigns in retail, donation appeals from associations and NGOs, catalogues and brochures from the tourism sector, invoices, official notifications and member information, as well as invitations to events and trade fairs.
Lettershop at GMLogistics
At GMLogistics, you receive everything from a single source: lettershop, mail dispatch and, on request, warehousing and fulfilment. We prepare your data, produce your mailing in-house in Vienna and dispatch it with optimised postage, both within Austria and internationally.
Are you planning a mailing? Tell us about it. We will advise you on the format, print run and the most suitable shipping method, and provide you with a non-binding quote.
Sources: GMLogistics
