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Relieving Postal Pains

Mailing Smarter Can Help You Stay Profitable

Here are 8 smart solutions to safeguard your business from rising postage costs.

1. Co-mail. Co-mailing will optimize your presort savings and build pallets that will qualify for delivery deep into the postal system. For example, publishers and catalogers can realize presort discount savings up to $35 per 1,000 copies mailed. With three decades of co-mail experience, Quad/Graphics offers the greatest variety and largest platform of co-mail equipment in the industry. Our four different co-mail solutions offer virtually every mailer the opportunity to participate, regardless of circulation or trim size.

Inline, we can combine different magazine or catalog titles during binding and presort them together
into a single mailstream while maintaining the unique attributes of each book. Or, we can incorporate prebound magazines or catalogs with other titles inline during binding, giving you flexibility in dimensions, page counts and binding styles. Offline, we can merge the mailstreams of several different prebound titles into one large mailstream. Alternatively, we can presort into a single mailstream individually polybagged titles with onserts and enclosures.

2. Drop ship. You can take advantage of deeper drop-ship discounts, qualify your mail for additional postage discounts and improve service by transporting your magazines or catalogs as close to their final destination as possible. Quad/Graphics’ drop-ship program will better qualify your mail for maximum discounts with minimal costs while also providing improved delivery consistency. Plus, we’re enhancing our program to include additional Sectional Center Facilities (SCFs) and drive more opportunities for postal savings.

3. Use address hygiene. This is step one to avoid becoming “junk mail.” With 6 percent to 10 percent of all mail currently being undeliverable, address hygiene minimizes the amount of bad addresses, appends postal codes for automation discounts and optimizes mail delivery — not to mention the potential to increase your response rates.

4. Eliminate duplicate addresses and nonresponders. Delivery optimization solutions such as merge/purge and suppressions eliminate waste and save postal dollars by mailing the right number
of pieces to the people who are most likely to respond.

5. Evaluate circulation plans. QuadData Solutions can help you determine whether marginal house
file names meet ROI requirements based on historical Life Time Value measures. Then you can intelligently examine your contact strategy and adjust the number of times you mail to a contact as an alternative to cutting each mailing. Purge your list of nonbuying, lapsed customers.

6. Use advanced database techniques. Now is prime time to select and segment customers and prospects more effectively. QuadData Solutions offers a wide variety of analytics and reporting services to collect, house, analyze and apply your data to create customized, highly targeted mailings. Not only can you reduce printing and postage costs by mailing only to your best customers and prospects, you can increase your response rates.

7. Improve response rates with 1-to-1 personalized print techniques. Unleash the power of your database by adding highly targeted personalization to your print. You’ll drive up sales and lower your cost per response, while building stronger, more profitable customer relationships. Our state-of-the-art manufacturing platform offers a full menu of solutions to customize your mailpiece with variable text and images in both black-and-white and color.

8. Remember that letter size is not necessarily more economical than flat size. While converting a flat size mailpiece to letter size will reduce your postal rate, variables such as postal weight limitations and addressing specifications, response rate, brand image, manufacturing and distribution considerations — plus the incremental cost of tabbing and traying your mail — all need to be factored into the bottom line. Carefully weigh the benefits before making the change.

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