Royal Mail Strikes

You may already have seen that Royal Mail workers will be striking on a wide range of dates from the 13th October onwards. Different sections of the Royal Mail network will be affected on different days, which will make it really difficult to avoid any impact to most businesses.

How can you keep up to date?

All of the latest Royal Mail strike news is here. This includes the affected dates, and details of which areas are striking when.

There is an FAQ page for businesses here, which explains how you may be affected and what options are available during strike action.

What else can you do?

We’re coming into a key time for small businesses, as Christmas draws closer. This holiday season is likely to feature in your business plans as a time to sell as much as possible, so it’s important to get some things in place if Royal Mail delays are likely to be an issue.

1. Communicate with your customers. Warn them that deliveries may well take longer and give them details of any delivery alternatives you might be able to put in place. Emails, website banners and pop-ups will all help, as will starting your campaigns earlier.
   
2. As we get closer to Christmas, some customers may happily pay for enhanced services that will add cost to their order. Find those options now, so you know what you need to do to get them in place. Make them available earlier than you think you need to, and you may find that some customers choose that option anyway!
   
3. KEEP reminding customers of the issue; we all know we miss individual emails in our own inboxes on occasion, and your customers are no different!
   
4. If you have predominantly local customers, can you offer a ‘click and collect’ service to reduce your reliance on Royal Mail? This may also give you a chance to reinforce your relationships by seeing your customers face to face.

Bear in mind that with increased pressure on household budgets at the moment, holiday shopping will start earlier than ever this year. A recent ‘Think with Google’ email included an article saying 26% of shoppers globally have already started their holiday shopping, with 18% having already made at least one purchase. You can’t start talking about holiday shopping too early this year, and in some respects the Royal Mail issues could be the perfect justification to do so.

If you have any other suggestions for minimising the impact of these strikes, please share them with us! We know many businesses are going to be hit hard by this upheaval on top of everything else at the moment, and would love to be able to share some creative suggestions if we can.