Outsource Your Business Communications Oregon

Effective handling of mass communications with your customers is a key component of every business.

If you have a few large customers, it's usually simple enough to handle all your needs on your own, using e-mail, postal mail, fax, or mobile phone SMS (Short Message Service) text messages. But if you need to communicate regularly with hundreds or thousands of customers, you may require more resources than a single desktop computer can provide.

You could opt to handle all your communications requirements in-house by investing in more technology resources, perhaps by adding a more powerful, collating printer, a new fax server, and related software. But the do-it-yourself approach may not represent the most efficient use of your time and money. If communications isn't one of your core business competencies, outsourcing may be a better option. Web-based services make this very convenient, but you'll need to determine if the convenience is worth the cost.

Large postal mailings are particularly labor-intensive operations. Putting them together can be painfully slow unless you have the right equipment and staff that's been trained to use it. You or your employees will need to print, collate, fold, stuff, and seal each envelope before affixing the postage and addressing the envelope.

It may not be economically feasible to set up a mass-mailing operation in-house if you perform only one or two per month. This task can be outsourced to a well-established industry of small printers or specialty letter shops that handle all the paperwork for you. I've discussed outsourcing mass e-mail needs in a previous column.

If your business depends on several communications media and you'd like to coordinate it all through a single service, consider FlyDoc from Esker, a company that specializes in document delivery services on demand.

You can use FlyDoc's Web-based service to handle postal mail, faxes, e-mail, and SMS communications. All FlyDoc services are available when you log in to the FlyDoc Web site. FlyDoc recommends you use a broadband Internet connection, particularly if you send large documents.

While it's simple to send a single flyer, e-mail, or fax, mass communication requires more work. For starters, you must develop a list of recipients.

You can enter individual contacts one by one directly into FlyDoc, but that could be time-consuming for a large list. FlyDoc can import a mailing list contained in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or a file in CSV (Comma Separated Values) format. After your list is in FlyDoc, you can use it for any of the supported services--including faxes or e-mail messages when time is of the essence.

I'll focus on postal mail and fax services, which can be time-consuming for small businesses to handle internally.