5 Mistakes You're Making with Your Virtual Offering

The most common mistake many operators make is handling postal mail manually. Manual postal mail management may work when you are just starting out, but it is not efficient and sustainable to achieve revenue growth. Mail Management Software allows you to upload and assign mail quicker while monetizing your mail handling fees.

PilotoMail, the mail management software that we developed and use in our coworking spaces, Piloto 151, allows us to offer a digital mailbox to both virtual and physical members. This streamlined system not only simplifies mail management for our members but also reduces the workload for our staff by automating tasks like manual data entry and associated fees for services like open and scan, forwarding, or shredding.

2. You don’t offer various tiers

Plan for three well-priced virtual office or virtual mailbox tiers. This way, you can tailor to different demographics while creating more revenue opportunities. You can set up included thresholds on mail handling depending on the plan they choose. 

It is crucial to set up mail handling fees where you decide each action’s costs and keep the revenue you make from those fees. You want to set the pricing based on your location and what fits your business best. 

With PilotoMail, you can offer a set amount of action requests for free depending on the plan your renter chooses and monetize any additional action your renter takes. This can be done for all the action requests, such as opening & scans, shredding, pickup, forwarding, recycling, and more. The best part is that with PilotoMail, you can create an unlimited amount of plans where you set the cost of the plans and action requests, and you get to keep all the revenue you make from it.

When managing mail, we agree that some things tend to be very time-consuming. Therefore, we encourage you to set up as many automations as possible. Luckily, with PilotoMail, you can automate the most tedious parts of mail management, such as compliance, billing, and specific action requests your members tend to take constantly. Once you automate particular processes in mail management, you’ll find that you have time for other work tasks that make more money than manual tasks.

We all have virtual mailbox renters who literally never or very rarely come pick up their mail. While holding your renters’ mail for a short period seems okay, if it extends into the months of holding, the mail will eventually take more space than you originally intended.

So, how can we encourage our members to pick up their mail once this happens? Or, more importantly, how do we make money from storing it for them all this time? Of course, a small letter barely takes up any space, but what if your member receives three or more pieces of mail every week? By the end of 3 months, these letters will have filled the mailbox, without counting any more oversized envelopes or packages they might also receive that month.

At Piloto 151, our coworking spaces in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the operations team was overburdened by forgotten mail and packages. We decided to include storage fees within PilotoMail. The storage fee encouraged our renters to pick up their mail and allowed us to generate extra income from storing it until it was picked up. Using our software, you can easily add storage fees depending on the type of mail piece and set thresholds for days you want to include in the virtual mailbox offerings.

One of the most critical aspects of managing mail on behalf of other people is avoiding mistakes at all costs. We like to promote a mail management system where you can log the history of any mail piece or package, primarily because you don’t want to misplace a renter’s mail piece but also because it usually contains important and confidential information. PilotoMail keeps an automated log of the mail trail from the moment it is uploaded onto the platform to when it is either picked up, forwarded, or shredded. Using this automated mail trail, you avoid manual logs and hold a mail “receipt” if, in any case, you would need to bring it up for liability reasons.