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Business Mail Advanced – the more you mail, the more you save!

Tips • 12th Oct, 17 • 0 Comments

 

At FP Mailing, we like to help you manage your postage costs and Business Mail Advanced is an easy way of reducing those costs if you issue a lot of mail regularly. Business Mail Advanced provides you with a discount, dependent on how many letters you wish to send and how efficiently you can prepare them for Royal Mail postage, so keep reading to find out more!

In a nutshell…

If you can produce a minimum of 500 letters at one time for delivery to UK-only addresses, as well as prepare your postage so that Royal Mail’s automated technology can read and verify the delivery information, you can gain the following discounts from the usual franking tariff price:

• 1st Class letters are discounted by 4.6p (10.5% reduction on Standard 1st Class Letters Meter prices)
• 2nd Class letters are discounted by 5.1p (16.5% reduction on Standard 2st Class Letters Meter prices).

However, if you post more than 1,000 items at once, you can receive additional Volume Related Discounts starting from 1.5% – the more you mail, the more you save!

Meeting the requirements

To receive the discount, you do have to jump through a few hoops for Royal Mail but it’s worth it once you get the discount! The following criteria must be met:

1. Appropriate letter dimensions
   • Minimum size is 145mm x 110mm, and maximum size is 240mm x 165mm.
   • Minimum thickness is 0.25mm, and maximum thickness is 5mm.
2. Appropriate presentation
   • Addresses must be machine printed in a defined area of the letter
   • Appropriate address location and format 
   • Letters need to bear a license number; usually applied when your machine franks a letter
3. Organisation
   • Letters must be separated into 1st and 2nd Class
   • Letters must be presented upside down and facing the front of the trays
4. Trays need to be placed in the wheeled containers provided by Royal Mail
5. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) address specification is recommended
6. Appropriate clear zones
   • Royal Mail requires certain areas of the mail piece to have no markings (clear zones), as they print bar codes on each item in these areas to assist the sorting process.
7. Complete a Customer Collection Receipt

How are the discounts calculated?

Royal Mail sorting office machines read the license number and check for address accuracy. After that, you will be allocated a discount item-by-item for every piece of your mail that is automatically sorted.

Claiming the discount

The good news is you do not need a refund application; discounts are refunded either by cheque or as a credit to your Royal Mail Account – simple!

If you have any further questions about how to qualify for Business Mail Advanced, would like to understand the savings or would like some friendly franking advice, give us a call on 01925 820 638.

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