Click2Mail Connect vs. Manual Direct Mail: Which Is Right for Your Business?

By Lee Garvey

The basement mailroom—once a staple of corporate America—is quietly disappearing.

Those dedicated spaces filled with printers, folders, stuffers, and employees manually preparing outgoing mail are becoming relics of a bygone era.

This transformation raises an important question for businesses still relying on traditional direct mail processes: Is it time to evolve? In this guide, we’ll talk about why your company should take advantage of customer relationship management (CRM) software to outsource our direct mail operations, and how to do it.

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The COVID Effect: Mailrooms That Never Returned

The pandemic created a natural experiment in direct mail management when businesses suddenly went remote.

“Before the pandemic, we saw a conversation among CFO-type people about reducing operational costs through downsizing mailrooms,” explains Lee Garvey, founder and CEO of Click2Mail. “The pandemic really accelerated that whole thing because your whole building closes down because there’s nobody in there, and the mailroom becomes an expense that you don’t need.”

What happened next was revealing.

“All of the customers that we gained during COVID, when everybody went back to the office, we lost zero of those customers,” says Carly Brown, customer support manager at Click2Mail. “Because everybody said to themselves, ‘We’re not going back to the old way of doing things.’ They all found actual things to do at work that were both more productive and made them better.”

This permanent shift suggests that many businesses discovered their manual direct mail processes weren’t as essential as they once thought.

“Process expectations these days are around digital methodology,” Lee says. “You’ve got a system that sends an automatic email when something happens; your expectations and your employees’ expectations are that we can automate postal mail as well.”

The Hidden Costs of Manual Direct Mail

Traditional direct mail processes carry significant costs that many businesses overlook when evaluating their options.

The most obvious cost is time. “It’s literally a full-time job. Depending on the size of your organization, it might be more than one full-time job,” explains Carly. Each campaign requires exporting data, formatting addresses, printing materials, stuffing envelopes, applying postage, and trips to the post office—time that could be spent on revenue-generating activities instead.

This burden increases when you consider how mail responsibilities scatter across an organization.

“Certainly your sales staff, accounting and finance people, HR people, marketing people—it’s a team effort,” Carly notes. Each department must independently learn these processes, creating redundancies throughout your company.

The impact extends to employee satisfaction and workflow. “People have really started to evaluate what they’re doing at work,” she adds. “Is printing letters, stuffing envelopes, and sticking postage meaningful for young professionals looking for work-life satisfaction? It’s really not.”

Then there are the tangible financial costs that accumulate quickly:

• Equipment investments: Printers, folders, stuffers, and postage meters
• Office space: Dedicated mailroom square footage
• Supply management: Paper, envelopes, ink, and postage
• Labor expenses: Staff time dedicated to manual mail processes
• Training costs: Onboarding new employees to mail procedures
• Postage inefficiencies: Higher per-piece rates without commercial tools
• Errors and waste: Materials and time lost to inevitable mistakes

Perhaps most significant is the opportunity cost—what your team could achieve if they weren’t managing manual mail processes. As Carly puts it, “If you can wipe away inventory management alone, somebody’s going to get a lot of hours back in their day.”

The CRM-Direct Mail Disconnect

Unfortunately, hooking up a direct mail campaign to your CRM by yourself isn’t easy. For businesses using CRM systems, manual direct mail processes create a significant disconnect in their customer communication strategies.

Without integration, direct mail becomes siloed from your other communication channels. This disconnect has several consequences:

• Data inconsistency: Manual exports quickly become outdated
• Timing challenges: Coordinating direct mail with other channels becomes nearly impossible
• Lost insights: Mail campaign results remain separate from your customer data
• Campaign complexity: Multi-touch campaigns become administratively burdensome

“If you’re using Salesforce and you want to do a mail campaign without integration, you’re going to have to export stuff, and you’re going to have to re-import it somewhere else,” explains Lee. “It’s a lot of steps and processes that you have to do manually that an integration automation does for you automatically.”

Modernize with Click2Mail’s Connect

Click2Mail’s Connect eliminates manual direct mail inefficiencies while maintaining its marketing power. The platform seamlessly connects with leading CRMs including Salesforce, Citrix Podio, Follow-Up Boss, Clio, and Google Sheets.

The system automates campaigns based on customer journey triggers. This makes sophisticated “trigger campaigns” possible where you touch people at just the right time.

Implementation is simple:

1. Connect your CRM and Click2Mail accounts
2. Define what mail goes out, when, and to whom
3. Let the system work while you focus elsewhere

The result? Optimized marketing, improved customer satisfaction, and automated mail tasks—with no monthly fees. You only pay for what you mail.

Click2Mail’s Connect offers:

• Seamless CRM integration
• Automated campaign management
• Real-time mail tracking
• Enhanced security compliance
• Pay-as-you-go pricing

Contact us to learn how to get started, or visit https://connect.click2mail.com/

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