What is a mail consolidator?
A mail consolidator produces mail for clients following the regulations of the destination countries including the appropriate postal indicia and address formatting (or receives mail from clients produced correctly) mixes and sorts it according to the requirements of the receiving postal authority overseas. The mail is then bagged and labelled appropriately to meet the requirements of the destination country or region.
By presenting the mail in a "sorted" condition to the postal operators the consolidator effectively handles some of the initial work for the postal operator, leaving the postal operator with less processing to undertake and fewer resources to employ. In turn they offer a trade rate to consolidators which reflects this, and this is much cheaper than the general tariff.
Also mail consolidators leverage the collective might of all their clients to negotiate with postal operators. Postal operators are only really interested in handling very large volumes of mail so clients alone can not usually access these services.
Mail consolidators also often have sophisticated data processing, mail fulfilment and sorting capabilities which clients, and their printers, simply do not have. Mail consolidators also have many years experience and established supplier relationships, often with many agents across the world.
Most mail consolidators will offer a range of delivery options and prices, and they can offer a mixture of services for delivering direct mail, transactional mail, customer correspondence, catalogues, magazines, journals, packets and parcels etc.
So to summarise the major benefits of working with a mail consolidator are:
- Cheaper prices
- More choice of delivery options
- Experience and expertise
- Value added services
Why work with MCA member mail consolidators?