The Pros and Cons of Standard Mail and Email Invoicing
When considering what to do and what to use to send out your invoices, it’s important to evaluate the pros and cons between the two most used types of delivery methods - regular mail (also known as snail mail) and email. These invoicing options are used by almost every business on the planet by either mailing out their invoices in standard mail (or FedEx or UPS), or, they email their invoices out.
Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of each:
Standard Mail Invoices - Pros: Unlike Emails, it’s much tougher for Standard Mail to be eaten up by a Spam or Junk folder. The recipient doesn’t need to add your email address to their trusted user list, and a standard invoice looks (and feels) official. You can take it one step further by requiring a signature upon delivery to ensure that someone in the organization received the invoice.
Standard Mail Invoices - Cons: Mail costs money, and as USPS Stamps continue to rise in price, sending letters continues to be more and more expensive. To send a Standard Mail Invoice, you need to print out the invoice, put in an envelope, stamp / write / type the address label(s), and then put a stamp on it - all of which cost money. Also, an invoice sent by mail will take 3-5 business days to arrive. The bottom line is it costs more to send the invoice and takes longer for your invoice to arrive - which delays the time in which you get paid!
Email Invoices - Pros: Email Invoices cut down on printing and postage costs. In fact, they almost eliminate these costs entirely. With email, you can send an invoice instantly, which is received instantly by your recipient. Emails can’t get lost in the trash, eaten by the recipient’s dog, or dropped in the wrong mail box by the postman. You can set your outgoing email to request a read receipt to ensure the person assigned to receive the invoice actually opens the email and acknowledges receipt of the invoice.
Email Invoices - Cons: Email, still to this day, faces 2 challenges that go well beyond email invoices. Email can be mistaken as spam or junk mail and deleted by the recipient’s email program before they even get to look at it. Second, Email faces a credibility problem. An invoice via email can be dismissed as nonsense by its recipient much easier than a standard mail invoice with an official company letterhead.
Which one should you choose? Well, in this economy (and in this technological era), you would be wise to choose the option with the least possible cost and the most time efficient delivery method. You might also want to consider the level of technical experience and overall preference of your clients who ultimately pay the invoices. One possible solution is to use a hybrid method based on your customers choice for invoicing delivery send a regular mail invoice for those customers who must have a printed invoice sent by mail. But send an email version as well, just as a back up to the printed version. In this way you accommodate your customer’s preference and at the same time get them used to receiving email versions of the invoice.
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