Established in 1985, All-Inn Verspreidingen is one of the largest door-to-door distributors of newspapers, brochures and unaddressed mail in the Netherlands. Now employing its third generation of Duplo Collators, the company continues to grow its unaddressed mail business by offering its advertisers exceptionally high quality distribution and targeting.
The Challenge
Dutch households receive the highest average number of unaddressed mail items in Europe*, so competition is fierce.
All-Inn’s strategy is to sell on quality rather than price, so the planning, preparation, collation and last mile delivery has to be exceptional. The company has also developed its own geomarketing software, which enables the customer to pinpoint the best response areas and thus deliver a higher response rate per item. However, this more targeted approach requires more shorter production runs of the same set.
“We have a loyal and high quality workforce. Although we pay well, finding quality staff is becoming more difficult. So we demand a lot from our employees and must maximise their time delivering to households by automating the process as much as possible.”
“In order to stay ahead of the competition, we need to keep investing in our people and the latest technology.”
Another more recent challenge has been the government’s attempts to reduce unaddressed mail volumes by insisting that households “opt-in” to receive unaddressed mail. Ironically, political leaflets for elections are exempt from such regulations.
The Solution
All-Inn has 15 years of experience using Duplo Esper Collators, and now has 5 machines in total. By investing in Duplo’s latest DM Mini Collation System – the first in the Netherlands – the company has been able to reduce the number of operators by 25% yet still maintain high productivity levels.
As production runs of the same set become shorter, the fast set-up and changeover time of the Duplo collating systems becomes even more important.
“Most of our deliverers hate collating unaddressed mail into sets, particularly all the various shapes and sizes. By giving them a pre-collated set which is easy to handle, they remain loyal which in turn helps to keep our HR and recruitment costs to a minimum. And the time they save means they can deliver to more households.”
The future
Despite being more expensive than the competition, All-Inn continues to attract new advertisers and repeat business.
“Business is growing because of the internet, not despite it, as digital and print media cross-promote and perfectly complement one another.”
“Overall we predict that volumes will remain stable. A few regular advertisers will start to use the medium more strategically and seasonally, while other predominantly digital and above-the-line brands add unaddressed mail to enhance their campaigns.”
“In the Netherlands unaddressed mail remains the number one advertising medium for generating retailer traffic.”
Pim Jansen – MD & Owner
Orlando Koorn – Operations Director
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* Source: ELMA Pan European Census 2017
