This post will serve has a follow up to our recent video on how to cut postage costs on catalog type mailers.

We want to expand on a few points so our cost-saving suggestions are complete. Please watch the above video before continuing so our points below make sense.

In the video, we spoke about cost-effective solutions for cutting postage on booklet or catalog type mailers. We mentioned the postage cost savings could be as high as $0.25 per piece. This savings does not include the additional costs to produce the options we’ve noted in the video.

For example, on the slim-jim piece, you will incur the cost of the (2) wafer seals required to mail at letter automation rates which is usually around $10.00/m. Another factor in moving from the full-size mailer to the slim-jim is the decrease in the amount of creative real estate. You will generally need to add 4 to 8 pages to make up for this lost space. Despite these two additional costs, the savings are huge because of how much postage you’re cutting.

The other option we spoke about is printing a full-size mailer but refolding (or soft-folding) the piece to 8.5 x 5.5. There are two additional costs associated with this as well.

First is the cost to refold the piece which generally runs about $500 depending on the equipment of your printer. The second is the cost to apply (2) wafer seals to close the piece and qualify for letter automation rates. As was the case above, even with these two factors considered, the cost savings are huge.

On a side note, the post office is reevaluating the use of the slim-jim format to make it run better on their letter sorting equipment. As it stands right now, many of the slim-jim pieces do not run well on their equipment and, as a result, have to be either hand sorted or run on their flat sorting equipment.

Stay tuned for an update on this ruling.

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On March 29th, 2009 the new USPS addressing requirements for flats went into affect. Flats are defined as direct mail measuring 11.5″ (w) x 6.125″ (h) up to a maximum size of 15″ (w) x 12″ (h).

To make things simple, we’re going to recap the new requirements and then point you to a couple of PDFs that contain additional information. This recap comes straight from the PDFs linked to below.

3 New Requirements for Standard & First-Class Mail:

1./ Mailers must address each piece using a minimum of 8-point type. Each character must be at least 0.080 inch high.

2./ If the mailpiece bears a POSTNET or Intelligent Mail barcode with a delivery point routing code, mailers may use 6-point type in all capital letters. Each character must be at least 0.065 inch high.

3./ On all automation pieces, the characters in the address must not overlap, the address lines must not touch or overlap, and each address element may be separated by no more than five blank character spaces. (A blank character space can equal the width of the widest letter used in the type.)

1 Additional Requirement For Standard Mail Only:

1./ Mailers must place the delivery address in the “top half” of the mailpiece (at the time of this writing, every piece of USPS literature we have says this is NOT a requirement for First-Class flat mail).

For more detailed addressing information, click below on the class of flat direct mail you send out.

First-Class | Standard

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First — we’re publishing our June direct mail newsletter on Wednesday or Thursday of this week — it features Caesars Pocono Resorts. Subscribe with your email (top right) if you want to receive an email when we make the case study live.

Today’s post is a quick blurb about the new USPS flat standards that are going into effect on March 29th, 2009.

The information was featured in DM News so I’m just going to include what they wrote:

“The US Postal Service has released new address standards for flat-sized mail, set to go into effect on March 29, 2009.

The standards will assist the USPS’ implementation of its Flats Sequencing System (FSS), which will sort flat-sized mail into delivery sequence, reducing carriers’ time spent manually sorting mail.

Mailers will be required to adopt new address placement and formatting requirements for periodicals, Standard Mail, bound printed matter, Media Mail and library mail flat-sized pieces set at automation, presorted or carrier route prices, the USPS aid. The standards also include revisions for automation and presorted First-Class Mail flats.”

We’ll post any updates to these new flat standards as they occur.