Flanagin’s Bulk Mail Service is an essential ally for businesses, nonprofits, politicians, and other individuals and organizations across the Region. Their service helps them reach thousands and thousands of households while taking the hours of labor involved in bulk mailing off of the customer’s shoulders – all at a discounted rate.
Flanagin’s customers rely on them to reach their audiences with their latest news, promotions, political platforms, donor acknowledgments – and much more. That makes it critical for Flanagin’s to offer an array of comprehensive services, and to get the job done right every time.
“It’s about having peace of mind,” said Donna Flanagin, owner of the service. “Once you’ve dropped it off here, you’re done – you can go on with your business without needing to worry, and we’ll handle everything from there.”
One of the simplest steps they take is to give customers all the information they need to make sure their mail moves smoothly through the post office, without any complications.
“We have checklists that we can give customers up front,” she said. “It tells you everything that you need to do to prepare, and makes sure that everything is correct before it goes to the post office so that they can avoid any red tape or delays.”
Customers often have their mailing lists assembled in a spreadsheet, typed up by hand – sometimes by multiple people. That leaves room for small differences in address styles, like writing “Street” instead of “St.” In a list of hundreds of names long, those slight changes can often result in creating hard-to-find duplicates, which is a costly mistake.
“Duplicates are huge from a financial perspective and an image perspective,” Flanagin said. “Not only are you paying for unnecessary mail, but it looks bad to the recipient. If you’re a nonprofit and one of your donors gets three of your mailers, they might think you’re not being very careful with their money.”
Flanagin can use special software to automatically unify those slight differences in spelling or formatting, and eliminate that risk.
“If you’ve typed an address as ‘P.O. Box’ my program will go through and take out all the periods, commas, or extra stuff to make all the addresses look alike,” she said. “That makes finding duplicates in Excel go from nearly impossible, to very quick and easy.”
That software also helps Flanagin’s customers save by identifying incorrect addresses in a bulk mailing list. Addresses, even if they look completely correct, are often invalid for simple but surprising reasons – which can result in extra costs if not caught.
“A lot of businesses in Valpo, for example, will use U.S. 30 as their address because it helps people find them, but it’s not actually their address, because that chunk of 30 is called Morthland Drive. If you have that address listed wrong on your mail, it’ll go through but at a higher rate, and my business is to get you the cheapest rate I can so we fix that as standard practice.”
Flanagin’s can also find out if an address is vacant or undeliverable, such as when a P.O. box has been closed. For a fee, they can even identify when an addressee has moved, and track them to their current address with a full history stretching back four years.
“This is so useful for cases where the address is valid because it’s an occupied address, but the intended recipient isn’t there,” Flanagin said. “It’s a situation where our customer thinks they’re reaching someone, but it’s not getting delivered because they’ve moved and but they’d have no way to know that. Now, we can go through our customer’s mailing list and find everyone who moved and make sure that doesn’t happen.”
In 2021, Flanagin’s Bulk Mail Service saved their customers, collectively, over one million dollars, through their discounted rates and behind-the-scenes efforts to give their customers high-end service and peace of mind.
“That’s all money that the customers would’ve spent and given to the post office to get their mailing out,” Flanagin said. “By using our service and our discounted rates, that money is all passed right back to the customer.”
To learn more about Flanagin’s Bulk Mail Service, visit mybulkmail.com.