Cambertown invited to join new partnership body with Royal Mail
13th Mayl 2010
|
Cambertown's relationship with Royal Mail as a main provider of mailing services has been further cemented by its being invited to join the Royal Mail Strategic Mailing Partnership.
The Strategic Mailing Partnership aims to shape how Royal Mail works with mailing houses to improve services for customers, by providing mailing houses with better industry insight, advaned service and product information, and a vast network of assistance. In addition of course the feedback will be two way, allowing the industry to voice its concerns, ideas, and aims in partnership with Royal Mail.
Terry Sorfleet, Cambertown's Managing Director, has been invited to attend the launch conference for the Strategic Mailing Partnership, in London.
|
Cambertown case studies win Royal Mail approval
12th Mayl 2010
|
As part of its continuing membership of the Royal Mail Mailing House scheme, Cambertown has to produce case studies on a regular basis to demonstrate that it is continuing to employ best practice within the mailing industry. The three most recent case studies submitted by Cambertown have all been accepted and passed by Royal Mail. Two of these involved Cambertown's expertise in providing a routine which pulled out and streamed off requests for specific products from web site data and then turned the requests into mailsorted address databases, so that the client in each case was able to benefit from the order processing, stock control and audit trail for their information packs, but also to enjoy the massive savings of mailsort discounts, as opposed to the much higher full public rate. The clients concerned were a major national charity and a regional tourist organisation, both of whom were offering standard free information packs.
"While this solution is not universally applicable to all clients, nevertheless it does work very well in situations where the client's web site is producing a high volume of requests for a single standard item. Even if these are mixed in with other items, we can now pull them out, mailsort them, and save the client money, provided there are enough of them," said Steve Rudd, Cambertown's Marketing Director.
The third case study, again for a charity client, involved using the information gained from the "special instructions" field on the client's web form, and actually printing this on the address label, in addition to the customer's address, for the packs of materials which their supporters requested. "Royal Mail are only actually obliged to attempt to deliver to the letterbox at the premises, but we found that, by adding in what the customer had typed about alternative delivery, we virtually eliminated the problem of returned mail for these packs for the whole campaign. This was probably because a lot of their supporters live in areas where the round is served by a rural postman, and they are obviously well used to instructions such as 'if nobody in, leave in the potting shed!' " Rudd added
|
Royal Mail Mailing House Scheme
28th April 2009
|
Perceptive browsers of the Cambertown web site will see that a new logo has recently appeared on our home page. We are pleased to announce that Cambertown is now an “official” member of the Royal Mail Mailing House Scheme. You may remember the old QMP (Quality in Mail Production) standard, which was backed by the Royal Mail and which came to an end over a year ago. Cambertown was QMP accredited since the scheme’s inception, and continued to be so, up until the day the QMP scheme was discontinued.
Now, QMP has been replaced by the much bigger, more all-encompassing, Royal Mail Mailing House Scheme, but it wasn’t simply a case of migrating across from the old scheme to the new one. Cambertown staff have had to attend training, and sit a written test set by Royal Mail in order to qualify. Having accomplished this with a pass mark of over 80%, we can now proudly display the RMMHS logo (bronze version). At present, everyone who has qualified for the scheme is at bronze level. Clearly our ambition is to get to "gold" level, and, ideally, to achieve this long before Britain’s athletes attempt the same thing in 2012! We’ll let you know how we get on.
Part of our participation in the scheme is to provide case studies of how we have successfully carried out direct mail campaigns in order to help spread and promulgate best practice across the whole industry. If you think any of your own work might benefit from being worked up by us into a case study, then please get in touch with me. The case studies can be “anonymized” if you don’t want to give away anything which might constitute competitive advantage or client confidentiality.
|
Royal Mail launch new product, Sustainable Mail.
28th April 2009
|
Despite the image it sometimes has of being “wasteful” in fact, most careful practitioners of direct mail have already been doing it in a "sustainable" way – even though direct mail is very cost-effective, still, given the costs of print and postage, there is no point (and a very short future for your budget) in blasting out badly addressed mail, willy-nilly, on a massive scale, to people who are not interested or not there to read it, and data changes remarkably quickly. What Royal Mail have done is to bring together the concept of careful data management with the concept of using specifically environmentally accredited materials for your print, and grafted on to these a monetary reward, in the form of additional mailsort discounts for mailings which comply.
At present, Sustainable Mail is only available on direct mail (as opposed to transactional mail) and only on mailsort mailings of letters and large letters. Royal Mail do have plans, however, eventually, to roll it out further. Obviously not all clients and mailings are going to fall into the category that can immediately benefit from it, but you should know of its existence, nevertheless, especially if “sustainability” and all that it implies, is part of your own business ethos.
The qualifying criteria for Sustainable Mail, in terms of the Royal Mail instructions themselves run to some eleven pages, and are of course available via the Royal Mail web site, but the easiest route, if you are interested, as always, is to let Cambertown do the leg work for you and if you want to know more, contact your account handler for details of whether your mail would qualify and/or benefit. Whether the various alternative mail providers to Royal Mail will in turn develop their own sustainable mail products, in response to Royal Mail’s initiative, remains to be seen. If they do, we will of course let you know.
|
Royal Mail price increase and minimum order change
March 06th 2009
|
Royal Mail are planning a price increase in early April 2009. As usual, we expect that this price increase will affect all Royal Mail products one way or another and also that it will, in turn, impact on the prices of other alternative mail "downstream access" service providers, whose prices are based on Royal Mail's pricing structure.
So, if you have any large mailings planned for the near future, please call your account handler at Cambertown and we will endeavour to do our best to speed them through before the price increase and save you some money!
Also, for those clients affected, the £20 Minimum Order Value for paper based postage docket books goes live in April, on April 6th, to be precise. The minimum order value for sales orders placed on paper posting "cheques" (this is what Royal Mail call the things that everyone else calls "dockets") will increase from £5 to £20 on 6 April 2009. In addition to this, every posting "cheque" they receive, regardless of its value, will be subject to a £1 handlng fee.
Orders placed via Online Business Account are not affected - the minimum order value for sales orders placed online will remain at £5, with no handling charge.
To avoid the possibility of inadvertantly being charged £20 plus a £1 handling fee by Royal Mail, clients should either ensure that, if they are using a paper-based docket book, they never mail less than £20-worth of post at one time, or, better still, speak to your account handler at Cambertown about moving to a Royal Mail online business account (OBA) where the minimum value is only £5.00 and there are no Royal Mail handling charges.
|
|
Previous News Articles >>>
|
|
|
|
