Be a Savvy Mailer and Save!

With ever-increasing postage rates in cost-conscious times, it is more important than ever to mail smart – start today by learning what your lettershop could be investigating and doing for you!

Don't Cut Corners
To offset postage and materials cost increases, it is increasingly up to you and your designer to do more with less while maintaining desired response rates. Cutting corners can directly and indirectly impact the quality, timeliness and response rates of your direct mail effort:

• Reducing the quality of materials may result in less aesthetically-pleasing packages which could be unfortunate if your package has a proven track record for producing a good response rate.
  
  
• By decreasing the number of test packages, some opportunities for discovering new controls and trying alternative directions may be missed.
  
  
• Frequently changing vendors in order to find the lowest cost provider can actually end up costing you more. Not developing and maintaining long-term relationships with vendors can result in increased uncertainty of the quality and timeliness of materials or service. Lack of vendor loyalty may also result in a lower comfort level, communication oversights and negotiating leverage for schedule considerations.

The Solution – Mail Smarter and Save Money
Fortunately, there are many ways to increase cost savings! Postage is the largest portion of direct mail program costs, often 5-10 times the production costs of a mailing. Thus a few percentage points reduction in postage can be very substantial and have a more dramatic effect on the budget than cutting corners in design or production.

“The more your mailer does to move the mail,
the more you save on postage.”

Various data processing and postal sortation processes can be combined to realize postage savings and increased speed of mail piece delivery.

1. How clean is your list? Data files need regular hygiene – including address correction alternatives, merge/purges to remove duplicates, suppressing records and more. The more your direct mail service provider does to clean your files and move the mail, the more you save on postage
   
   
2. After the file hygiene has been completed and you have your targeted and deliverable addresses, it is important to be sure to maximize the postal savings to these addresses. Mailing to destination entry(s) is a way to dramatically decrease the piece rate that you pay for mailing your programs. BMCs (Bulk Mail Centers) and SCFs (Sectional Center Facilities) are destination entry USPS facilities located throughout the country, between the post office of entry and recipient. Delivery of mail to these facilities saves the USPS money on internal freight and sortation, resulting in savings which are passed along to the mailer through a reduced postage rate.
   
   
3. To fully realize potential savings, it is imperative that a Destination Entry Analysis be done on all standard (3rd) class mailings. Once qualified, most mailers will charge a small processing fee and freight costs will be incurred to bring the mail to each destination entry facility. A thorough analysis of each mailing will determine whether there are net savings in mailing to destination entry(s). If the postage savings exceed the slight costs of processing, freight and any minimum costs, then the mail should be sorted down to the BMC/SCF level.
   
   Please note that many mailers have a previously determined minimum quantity for drop shipping mail that they use to determine whether or not mail is sorted down to the BMC/SCF level. It is important to request that your mailer not set minimums for your mailings to be considered for BMC/SCF sortation based on an arbitrary quantity, but rather analyze each mailing and destination entry to determine net savings. Though the postal savings can seem marginal when looking at a per piece rate, for larger mailings especially, the difference between the postage savings and the fees and freight can be tremendous!
   
   
4. Beyond the financial savings realized by destination entry postal sortation, there are additional benefits which should be considered. Destination entry sortation increases control of the timing of delivery in-home as well as reporting possibilities. Mailings that have time-sensitive in-home dates can be more narrowly targeted and, with additional costs to expedite freight, can be delivered sooner if needed. BMC/SCF “tracking” reports are also fairly standard and supplied by most carriers as requested – these reports show dates and times of mail delivery to each destination entry facility.

With postage savings offering such great potential for stretching direct mail budgets, it's important for you to be familiar with these cost-saving processes. Rather than simply requesting quotations on material and lettershop costs – it should be a regular practice to compare postal analysis from vendors to see where additional savings might be realized. Vendors who recognize the benefits of aggressive postal sortation as a competitive advantage should be eager to run a demo postal analysis on files for their clients.

Postage is the only place within your direct mail budget where you can cut costs with no ill effect on your package or results. Be sure to ask your vendor to show you how to mail smarter!

Not sure whether your vendor is mailing smarter? Contact us today for a complimentary 2nd opinion at info@measuredmktg.com or 312.929.4882.