Here's an interesting fact: Since March of 2020, 69% of businesses in the U.S. have permanently closed some or all of their office spaces.
That begs a question: With all of these offices (and their associated mailrooms) closing, and with more people adopting the digital nomad way of life, where is all the physical mail being sent?
The answer? Many businesses are adopting digital mailbox services and online mail forwarding services.
These services handle the bulk of the mail that mailrooms once used to handle and provide the business with a virtual address to replace the address that came with their former physical location.
If you’re thinking about going the same route with your own business, then you’ll need to learn a bit about how these mail forwarding services work — and you’ll be interested in browsing the top forwarding services out there. We’ll cover both below.
A mail forwarding service does much more than ship mail from one address to another. In fact, mail-forwarding service providers should deliver a full suite of services. They’ll receive your mail, notify you when they’ve received it, then provide you with different options to handle the mail.
In terms of handling, these service providers should scan envelopes so that you can review them digitally. From there, you’ll be able to make decisions about what to do with the mail: Open and scan it, have it forwarded on to a new address, have it shredded or destroyed, and so on.
Each year, the USPS delivers billions of pieces of mail to millions of addresses. In 2021, for example, the USPS delivered almost 130 billion pieces of mail to 163 million different delivery points. That’s a lot of mail — and much of it ends up in business mailboxes around the country.
That’s one reason why mail-forwarding providers are invaluable for businesses. These providers offer services that make it efficient for you to handle vast volumes of mail on a daily basis. For instance, many mail forwarding services will presort mail for you and automatically dispose of junk mail. When you have dozens or hundreds of envelopes to review daily, this is a huge time saver.
Mail forwarding providers also eliminate the need for an on-premises mailroom. Most offer business and enterprise accounts with various features like multiple user accounts, tagging and search features, and other tools that make it easy to view and sort mail.
Instead of making trips to the post office, then sorting mail by hand, and delivering it to various offices, people can just log on and check their digitized inboxes. This can be a huge advantage not only for businesses looking to move away from traditional mailrooms, but also for businesses who rely on a remote or distributed workforce without a centralized office.
Beyond helping you manage large volumes of snail mail, forwarding service providers offer a lot of other advantages. Let’s go in-depth on some of the biggest benefits you’ll see.
When mail forwarding services or virtual mailbox services receive mail, the first thing they do is scan the envelopes to your online mailbox. At that point, you’ll have several options — and one of those options is to digitize critical documents. Mark which envelopes you’d like to have opened and scanned, and your provider will create a high-quality digital record that you can share, save, or archive in cloud storage. This gives you a permanent digital record so you won’t have to worry about what happens when paper copies get lost.
This advantage is a big one, especially nowadays. A recent survey from McKinsey reveals that 58% of people work from home either some of the time or all of the time. It’s a trend that is expected to grow — and as it does, businesses will come to rely more and more on virtual mail services and virtual mailrooms rather than on-premises mailrooms.
Why? Because whether you’re traveling or working with remote team members from around the country, mail forwarding companies offer convenient remote access to mail no matter where you happen to be.
Most businesses need a permanent address — and for some businesses, this can present a challenge. For example, if you’re a startup working out of a home office, you may not want to use your home address as your business address. Similarly, companies that rely on distributed or remote workforces may not have a central office that can receive incoming mail. When you sign up for a mail forwarding service, you get a permanent business address that will stay the same, even if your headquarters changes locations.
For many business owners, privacy and security is a concern — and that’s another great reason to choose a mail forwarding service. Establishing a physical address through these services provides a layer of separation between your home’s mailing address and your business, which helps you keep your home address — and your life outside of your business — private and secure.
Tired of daily trips to the post office? Or sifting through large piles of mail, half of which turns out to be junk mail? Mail forwarding services are a fantastic solution to these problems and more. They receive and sort the mail for you and provide easy online access to it. You can check mail 24/7 from anywhere, use tags to sort it into folders, or even forward digital copies to team members who need to see it.
Most of these services also offer check deposit services, which saves you the hassle of opening envelopes, plus the trips to the bank. Ultimately, receiving mail through a mail forwarding service is as easy as managing your email inbox.
Now that we’ve discussed the advantages a mailbox forwarding service can offer businesses, it’s time to look at some of the top virtual mailbox options out there. The following services will all receive your physical mail at a real street address — and give you the virtual tools you need to manage it online.
For a mailbox forwarding service that offers a robust set of features, look no further than Stable. This service gives you a real street address at which you can receive both mail and packages. Currently, you can choose from addresses in three states (California, New York, and Delaware) with Texas and Florida locations to come.
When Stable receives postal mail, each envelope gets scanned so that it appears in your virtual mailbox. You choose what to do next: Open and scan, forward mail to another address, deposit checks, put it in mail storage, dispose of it with mail shredding, and so on.
With all of this, Stable offers some unique features that businesses will appreciate. Hands-on onboarding means that Stable will pre-fill the required USPS 1583 form for you, and complete the necessary verification. This comes with change of address guidance to help you understand how to update your address with government entities, vendors, and more.
It’s all about providing an amazing customer experience with Stable — which is why they boast a net promoter score of over 70 (extremely high for the industry).
The sheer volume of locations available makes Anytime Mailbox a great choice for businesses. This service offers real street addresses all over the globe at more than 1,800 locations. Most are U.S. addresses, but you’ll also find addresses in many major countries — which can help you cut international shipping costs.
This service also offers a somewhat different pricing model than most others. While most others charge a flat monthly fee for service packages that include a virtual mailbox, this service’s pricing varies based on the address location. In other words, you can potentially save money by choosing an address in a less expensive area.
PostScan Mail offers all of the standard features that you’d expect — like receiving mail items, scanning, sending email notifications, forwarding, and more. And they also offer something unique that not all mail forwarding providers can do. With PostScan Mail, you can choose between one of their virtual business addresses, which are real street addresses, or you can go with a virtual P.O. box. Virtual P.O. boxes are a good, cost-saving choice for business owners who travel a lot, but who don’t need package handling or an official street address.
Another thing that you can do with PostScan Mail is pick up your mail in person, just as you would at your local post office. This is a useful feature that can also help save costs if you happen to be near to the address location.
If you need a provider that can handle global mail, iPostal1 has addresses in more than 2,500 locations all over the world. That’s one of the features that makes this mail-forwarding service a great option for businesses. iPostal1 also offers all the rest of the features you’d expect, like package forwarding, recycling for unwanted mail, mail scanning, and more.
On top of that, iPostal1 also offers Virtual Office plans. These are unique offerings that can help businesses consolidate mail, call forwarding, voicemails, and fax all into one service. With the Virtual Office Plan, you get a toll-free phone number plus an electronic fax line, making it easy to cover all your communications bases.
Traveling Mailbox is a popular choice for RVers, expats, and travelers — but it’s also a good choice for businesses, especially if you travel a lot for your business. That’s because, in addition to standard mail forwarding services, Traveling Mailbox lets you pick up mail at a location of your choosing.
If you know you’ll be in an area with a Traveling Mailbox storefront, just arrange to have your mail forwarded to that location. With more than 50 virtual mailbox locations in the U.S. and worldwide, you’ll often have access to physical locations.
Mail forwarding services can make life so much easier for businesses — and each provider has something unique to offer that may fit your particular needs. Stable stands at the top as a mail forwarding and virtual mailbox service that offers a broad range of services and features, plus addresses available all over the United States.
Ready to get started? Stable makes onboarding simple. Just click here and fill out the form to begin.
