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How to Make Your Shipping Parcels Look More Professional

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales ArticleWhen sending out packages to clients and customers, you want each shipment to bear the name of your company in a neat and professional manner. In fact, your shipping parcels need to make it obvious that they are coming from the same place. You can make professional shipping practices into a habit by utilizing shipping labels. Make your shipping labels look uniform and crisp by using a bold font, high quality envelopes and closing your envelopes neatly.

Your products can be neatly placed in a box if they’re big, but you can neatly place them in mailers that bear your company name for small products. A professional-looking mailer can be an advertisement in itself.

Why Your Company Needs to Print Each Shipping Label

A hastily written shipping label is not very legible, which could lead to delivery delays. If the delivery person can’t read the zip code or make out the name of the intended recipient your shipments may end up getting returned and being marked as undeliverable. Time is crucial when shipping parcels to customers, business partners, and vendors. If you want them to have a professional impression of your place of business, you need to have each shipping label printed up neatly which you can do if you buy a printer and a shipping label set.

Most e-commerce platforms are integrated with a shipping label feature so you can print them nicely and cleanly in their recommended label printer. You must utilize this feature so your parcel will contain accurate information and will have the barcode to help track items in transit.

Ensure that your labels have your company name and address as well as the name and address of the recipient printed out and aligned prior to sending your packages.

Envelopes Count When Shipping Parcels

The envelopes your company uses to send parcels help to keep the contents of each package intact and undisturbed. Not all of your shipments are going to be made up of papers. If your company is sending a package that is fragile, use padded envelopes that won’t tear or easily be compromised. All shipping boxes and envelopes also need to be thick so that their contents aren’t visible from the outside. Include packing peanuts for added security if you think that the items inside of your shipments may shake or move around in transit.

You may also wrap the items in bubble wrap before inserting them in the envelope; this way, you can ensure their safety and protection. Better yet, a new product called bubble mailers already has the perfect cushioning inside to protect your items.


Professional Methods for Securing Envelopes

There should be a strong security tab for securing envelopes when sending out parcels professionally. In other words, you may want to avoid using the type of envelopes that you moisten and apply pressure to close the tab. Use envelopes that peel and stick so your recipient will know if it has been tampered with prior to delivery. You can also use security tape to ensure that your parcels are never opened before they get to their destination. If your company is sending out confidential papers or packages that are private in nature, your shipping methods can help to deter tampering.

When parcels that come from your company arrive looking professional and completely intact, your clients will easily identify all of the efforts taken to safeguard their mailings. Professional mailing efforts will also enable you to track packages and learn when a shipment has been diverted. Start with neatly printed custom labels and your workers can confirm that they have included the correct shipping information prior to dropping off packages to be delivered.

Use the best quality envelopes and package all parcels appropriately and they will arrive on time to the designated party. Your customers will make more purchases knowing that their shipments always arrive securely and professionally packaged.

The cost of doing business includes product presentation. This also includes wrapping your products and presenting them nicely to your customers. Often, customers put a significant deal on product presentation. Therefore, it’s best to create a lasting impression on them as this may dictate their future buying decisions. Your job as a business owner doesn’t stop upon receiving the payment. Ensuring that the items are delivered to them wholly and safely should also be your priority.

Can You Look Professional Without Paying Professional Prices For Your Office?

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Many things have changed in the world of business, but a few things have stayed the same. Indeed, automation has taken over the scene like wildfire; each employee must be worth their weight in gold, the technology we use is incredibly fast, adaptive and able to do many things online which you once could only do in person. However, the look, feel and image a business headquarters projects, can make or break you. Offices around the world have been updating to keep up with the demand of modern employees who want the work environment to be fluid and encouraging. It’s also key that investors and potential partners get to view your office as a sign of trust and high standards. But how should one go about remodeling a business office? With a little common sense and understanding human behavior, your office can be redesigned to increase productivity and boost morale levels for a healthier work environment.

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Personalizing is the key

Think about it, when you’re at home and working in your office, you feel more inclined to go the extra mile. It’s because you feel right at home, and the room you’re in reflects your personality. The best office spaces aren’t merely functional and efficient; they also capture the spirit of the person and company work in them. If you have a mascot or perhaps your logo, hang it up in the main office area. It’s kind of like planting your flag, whereby your employees will subconsciously treat the work area with more respect. It shows they’re part of a team, and that this spot is theirs and everyone’s little corner of the world, each sharing a common goal. You might also find that having your company colors flourish throughout the office, such as the color of the chairs, computer screens, or even just the pens and pads, can have a positive effect of inclusion.

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Refurnish where you can

Nobody wants to live in a stale and pale environment, let alone work in one day after day. Renovate the office by buying chairs, tables, and desks. You may find that equipment leasing is the best option to quickly and affordably change the look of your office. You can lease some of the trendiest office furniture going around, with correct posture chairs, wide executive chairs for the boardroom, and nice wide tables, so employees don’t feel crowded at their workstations. Refurnish where you can, so if you see the sofa in the reception room getting worn out, replace it with something that’s more in tune with where your business is heading now. By updating the work environment to the current attitude of your company, you also show anyone who visits, that you’re mindful of how you present yourself to both customers and clients.

Artwork and plants

Don’t be afraid to buy plants to put in the corners of your office. Natural greens from vegetation have been proven to make for a better work habitat. Hang up painting you like, to inject a bit of art and creativity to the professional setting. Employees should feel as if they’re not being pressured by the dullness and brutalist approach of most modern commercial buildings.

When you’re looking for that professional image, you should also look for a good deal. Updating your office isn’t just about buying the latest equipment, it’s about cultivating a healthy and productive work environment.

The Only Guide You Need For Creating Strong Customer Relationships

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Creating strong customer relationships is positively key if you’re going to keep them for the long run. If you don’t mind whether they run off to your competitors, go ahead and leave this article. If you want to make sure that your customers love you and stay with you for the foreseeable future, then you need to know how to create a strong customer relationship. Read on to figure out how you can go about this!

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Be Honest About What You Can Do

If you’re not honest with your customers about what you can do, you’ll likely tarnish your reputation in the process. You might really want to do what they’ve asked of you, but if you know that you can’t or it won’t be very good, just be honest about it. They’ll respect you far more and you may even be able to come up with a solution. Always be as honest and authentic as possible.

Go Above And Beyond Expectations

Make sure that in every customer interaction you have, you go above and beyond their expectations. Doing more than they expect will make them remember you and come back to you again and again. Look at what your competitors do and figure out what you can do that will set you apart. Always aim to offer incredible value for money, unrivalled customer support, speedy delivery, and other things that will make you stand out.

Keep Things Lighthearted

Keep things lighthearted with your customers and they’ll feel more ready to open up to you about what they need. If they feel you are rude, indifferent, or unhelpful, they’re going to go somewhere else and ask questions. Be as helpful and happy as you can.

Learn As Much About Them As Possible

Learning as much about your customers as possible is important. After all; each one is individual – they are far more than just a number. You can learn about them in various ways, and there’s even software you can get that tracks the visitors who come to your site and gives you information about them so you can start building a strong relationship right away. One option is visual visitor. But is visual visitor worth signing up for? You do your research and decide!

Email Marketing

If you’ve met a few potential clients recently, perhaps at a conference or expo, you need to make sure they remember you. Often, no matter how friendly you are, they won’t remember you or what you do right from the get-go. Make sure you follow up after a meeting immediately, so that you stick in their minds. Personalize your emails to them if possible. Remember though; people are rarely ready for what you have to offer when you first meet them. This is why getting their emails and giving free insight is a great way to stick around in their brains for when the right time comes.

Remember that happy, loyal, engaged customers will be the best free marketing you will get. They will become like sales people for you, raving about your business and making sure everybody knows what they think. Make sure you use these tips to build strong customer relationships and you’ll create exactly this for your business!

When You’re Tied Up In Supply Chains, You Need A Strategy

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According to estimates by supply chain management organizations, the global supply chain market is worth more than $10 trillion a year. In short, it’s an enormous business, consuming some 6 percent of total world GDP, more than military spending and education combined. Getting our goods from one location to another is just really, really expensive.

As a company, managing your supply chain, organizing shipments and coordinating your efforts with other companies takes a lot of planning and effort. Here’s how to execute a great supply chain strategy without getting tied up in knots.

Get Better At Returns

Even in the most solid of supply chains, there’s a risk that either you or those further down the chain will receive goods they don’t want. This is an inevitable part of business and something which can never truly be eradicated. But it can become costly, especially if you don’t have the processes in place to reprocess or return items quickly.

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Returns management should be a major focus. You need to inform all staff on a standardized return process so that if a return is required, it can be dealt with as quickly as possible without imposing further admin costs. With a good returns policy in place, your company can stand to benefit too. If you notice the same items coming back to you, again and again, you can collect data and use that information to improve your processes. Collecting proper records of returns helps to reduce defects and deliver a better quality product to your clients.

Monitor The Performance Of Vendors

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As a business, you also depend heavily on the performance of your vendors. If they continually make late shipments or fail to supply adequate products, it can have a knock-on effect on your business. Making sure that your vendors are regularly monitored is essential. Monitoring provides you with direct evidence of their performance and allows you to target specific issues of concern. Today’s modern vendor management software provides all this information on an easy-to-understand dashboard, allowing you to see their performance in real time.

Improve Your Distribution Network Through Standardisation

If you’ve ever watched a large commercial logistics operation at work, you’ll have noticed something: everything is standardized. The reason for this is that standardization makes things predictable and easy to manage. Having the same model of truck, or the same kind of docking bay at a warehouse helps keep maintenance costs low and predictable. If you need a particular kind of truck, you can find a dealer here. Utilising the same equipment across your entire fleet allows workers and drivers to use any machinery that happens to be available without having to be retrained.

Use Data At Every Stage Of The Process

Businesses are beginning to realize that data holds the key to greater efficiency and profits. With the right data collection methods, you’re able to collect information about precisely what’s in your inventory, what’s on its way to your warehouse or facility, and what needs to be shipped in the next hours, days or weeks. The gives you an unprecedented ability to control and manage your stock and provides you with clear guidelines about which jobs have to be done by when.

Reduce Waste, Shrinkage, And Fraud

Supply chains aren’t impervious to human error or malicious acts. They can be exploited by criminals within your organization, or become the victims of accidents. Some companies never fully investigate leakages like this, while others make a point of it. A leak in your supply chain could ultimately wind up costing you a lot of money. That’s why leading companies always make sure that the numbers reported in their software matches up to the figures after a physical count.

The best way to do this is to use scanning technology. Rather than have workers go out and manually count all the items in your inventory (with all the human error associated with that process), it’s much better to count items both in and out of your facility so that you can isolate problems in your supply chain. Running a tight ship will quickly tell you whether shrinkage problems are arising upstream or downstream from your facility. Once this happens, you can then pass on your data to the affected parties and help them resolve any security issues they may be having.

Automate Everything

Automation technology has come on leaps and bound in recent years. The annual demand for tactile robots is doubling, and by 2020, the market for robots will be nearly 10 times what it was in 2010. With so many robots coming onto the market, the cost of automating supply chain processes is going to fall dramatically: in fact, it is already.

Currently, the majority of robots are software-based. They do things like buy inventory automatically if levels start to fall, negating the need for human administrators. They’re also able to monitor inventory levels and issue warnings if levels fall too low and production is jeopardized.

In the future, robots will become an increasingly important part of the entire supply chain process. Driverless trucks will deliver payloads to robotic warehouse robots, which will then ferry components to their designated areas. The only job for humans will be to supervise the process, and fix the robots when they go wrong.

Get Your Team To Understand The Cost Of Managing A Supply Chain

A supply chain is an interdependent economic construct. Each element in the chain depends, indirectly, on the costs imposed by every other link. Although it is difficult to communicate across companies and coordinate, getting your own team to cooperate on matters of cost is a lot easier. Make sure that senior managers in your company are talking to each other and understand how costs they impose on their part of the supply chain impacts other departments. Knowing exactly where your business is spending money is a surefire way to improve the performance of parts of the business which are not so cost-sensitive. Having a central database of departmental costs across your entire company will make it easier for you to streamline your operations.

Starting A Business? Utilising Experts Can Help!

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When you start your own business, you are putting yourself in a position of ‘jack of all trades’. As a one-man-band, you are effectively doing it all yourself until you get enough traction in your company to bring in more people to help you with your business growth. Not every business owner wants to handle every area of their business, and contrary to popular belief, this is okay! It’s not a failure to want to concentrate on your own strengths and to do this, you need to know where the experts are. Part of your business plan will include a portion on expansion and to be able to facilitate this, you need to be able to focus on the areas of your business that are strengths for you. It’s not a bad thing to know your weaknesses as a business owner, but if you don’t own those weaknesses from the beginning you could find yourself drowning before you’ve even begun.

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The best way to ensure that your company doesn’t fall at the first hurdle is to explore outsourcing. Most entrepreneurs are aware that they have a plethora of talents, if they didn’t they wouldn’t have what is required to get a business off the ground. However, this doesn’t mean that you have every single tool at your disposal to make your company a success. You may not be at the point yet where your company is ready to expand, but that doesn’t mean you won’t have the budget to pay the experts to help you! The hard work of starting a business doesn’t end with a successful launch, it only starts at that point. Not being able to do it all in your company means you need to know where to look to find help. There are many pieces of a business that get outsourced, and the most common are IT, marketing and human resources. If you aren’t aware of how you can outsource, you can read this more in-depth article for more information.

When you start a business, you have to take in as much advice as possible so that you can be a success. Business growth starts with asking for help and it’s that help that can keep your business afloat. When you get advised to outsource some of your business processes, you can feel like some of your company is being taken off of you. Taking steps toward outsourcing can be a long process while you decide how to manage your business. As a progressive entrepreneur, playing to your strengths is the smartest business strategy you can implement. The thing is, to be able to concentrate on your strengths you have to allow outsourcing to happen.

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Knowing when you should outsource your daily, time-consuming activities is difficult. If you have a team in-house who are ready to take on the work, timing your outsourcing will centre around you and your staff being unable to continue with the workload. You want your business to grow, but if you have no time left in the day to pursue the growth, then consider outsourcing. You don’t need to have absolute control over everything in your business, so read this article here and learn how to delegate tasks effectively. There is a lot of advice online that can tell you when the optimal times to outsource is, but popular advice says that outsourcing from the very beginning is the best idea. You could start by outsourcing your payroll processes to an external accountant or finance company, and grow into other ventures from there.

We mentioned earlier that IT, human resources and marketing are the most common business elements that are outsourced and the chances are you are already outsourcing your finances. Any task in your business that you haven’t got the time to dedicate your attention to can be outsourced. Using a digital marketing agency to handle your campaigns instead of managing them yourself can be hugely beneficial and money very well spent. Marketing is such a big deal for businesses, as you have the choice of print marketing, digital marketing, email marketing and mobile marketing at your fingertips. You need to spend time on business growth and all of these marketing elements are going to be a big part of that growth. If you hand over your marketing campaigns to an outside company, you end up with a whole team of people working for you that you have allocated your budget to. The beauty of this is that you are not going to be the one to manage personalities, salaries or ego as you have taken that outside of your office. All you have to do is approve the campaigns that your outsourced marketing team comes up with.

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When you are choosing which areas of your business you should outsource, you should ensure that you are doing it for the right reasons. Your area of expertise may not lie in data management and analysis, nor would it lie with data protection, so outsourcing your IT services to a company that specialise in those areas is a smart decision to make. Business management is all about knowing where your strengths lie and capitalising on those. You can pay outside companies to be strong in the areas that you are not and this is something very important to remember. Finding the right IT companies, HR companies and marketing companies to work on your behalf is rather like interviewing individual staff. You have to know your long-term aims and goals before you can go ahead and sift through the many businesses that offer those services.

The key to finding the right businesses to work with will come from recommendations, reviews and personal experiences of those in the same niche of business that you are in. If a trusted mentor tells you to use a particular company because of their efficiency and value for money, it’s worth looking into. It doesn’t necessarily mean they will be the right company for you, but it’s always good to trust the word of someone you know. Once you’ve found the right providers for the work you need, it’s time to check and recheck references and draw up contracts. You must be sure to effectively communicate your expectations to the companies that you want to outsource to. What you have in mind may be completely different to what a new, trendy company has in mind. You have to be clear about the service you want to pay for and as time goes on, a relationship can be built. It isn’t easy to let go of control of parts of your company that you have grown and nurtured, but the only way to keep that vision successful is to trust that there are people out there who have more expertise than you do.

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The last thing you need to do as a business owner is let go. The control that you have to hand over is not simple, but the collaboration of working with other companies can open so many more doors for you. You need experts on your side in all fields to be able to be a success, and it’s less about the logic and more about the mindset behind it. You may be the only person who knows exactly what your business needs, but it takes a village to achieve that vision with you. There’s no need to run everything yourself when as a team, you can get your business to the heights you’d like it to be.