Metro Mailing & Printing

You know, if you are reading this blog post, we consider ourselves reasonably lucky. Back in the old days, before the online pharmacies, gambling sites, Russian banking scams, and that Nigerian guy with $1 Billion to deposit in your checking account, took over 90% of all email traffic, you could get a legitimate message across to your clients, friends or associates.

Today, we live in “virtual gated communities,” with spam guards posted outside to supposedly keep the undesirable elements off our screens. The problem is that these guards are erratic on their best days and downright dangerous on bad days–they filter out crucial, time-sensitive business emails and let through fictitious characters like Dvolsk Glocovich who somehow seems to be emailing from your very domain but is in the business of sending you prescription meds in discreet packaging from the Bahamas.

While getting home to see your mailbox looking like a trash bin full of nationally-generated old fashioned junk mail may not be any more relaxing than losing clients through spammed out emails, there are some distinct advantages to making a selection standing at your kitchen trash can. You have the option to save mail pieces for later reading (because they at least arrived).

A well-targeted, professionally-executed local mailpiece delivered to a business client or potential customer has a very high chance of being read and saved compared to an email–if the email even makes it past most corporate or service provider spam filters. Indeed, Direct Marketing Association figures indicate that direct mail outperforms the average ratio for all types of direct marketing. Every $1 spent on direct mail advertising, the DMA reports, brings in an average of $11 in sales (more than twice the return from any other medium).

Don’t get us wrong. Email campaigns can be a powerful tool in your overall marketing arsenal. You can generate them cost-free in your office, pay a web design company, or subscribe to one of the many internet bulk email companies. Businesses have successfully implemented campaigns they begin with email surveys and end with high quality customized mailpieces to responders. Of course, it is obvious here that good customer data are crucial to setting up any multi-tiered marketing program. The data can include your personal database, or one you can purchase through a mail house based on criteria you specify.

So let’s wind up this discussion with a summary:

1. Email delivery is erratic but can be part of a comprehensive marketing plan
2. Hardcopy direct mail is at least twice as effective as far as return on your dollars
3. Clean, accurate, and targeted data are essential to any successful marketing strategy

At Metro Mailing and Printing, we can help you design and implement a successful and cost-effective strategy by analyzing your database needs, designing, printing and mailing variable or static mailpieces, and even setting up an email marketing program. Contact us today at 704-372-4554 to discuss your needs.

Starting on Nov. 23, 2008, the postal service put into effect a requirement that all automated presorted mailings follow guidelines to incorporate recent address changes. The move is meant to avoid the circulation of massive amounts of undeliverable mail which tends to clog the postal system. The postal service offers several options for customers to become compliant with these requirements and receive automation discounts on their mailings. Some of these include:

• Ancillary Service Endorsements (Such as “Address Service Requested”) which may charge you a fee for returning mail back to you
• Adding “Or Current Resident” on each label, which makes the piece less personal and does not inform you if your intended contact has moved
• NCOA Link Processing, which matches address changes against the national database and enables you to correct your own data with updated addresses

At Metro, our certified software offers NCOA Link Processing at reasonable rates. A processed list (or subsets of it) can be used for up to 95 days. As a cost-saving measure, we return a list of changed addresses back to the customer so the customer’s internal database can be updated. The customer can then send us new sublists from this updated database for 95 days after processing before recertification is needed.

A summary of Move Update can be found here.

A discussion of the NCOA Link process can be found here.

Certain database format requirements must be met in order for your list to process through NCOA Link. Please contact us at Metro to learn how our NCOA Link Processing can make you automation compliant and also help keep your databases current.

PDF has gained momentum over the past few years as the file of choice for reliable transfer of fonts and layout. Office software such as Word and Publisher are notorious for being unreliable when going from one computer to another. Word will actually change fonts without warning when it encounters a missing font. Publisher tends to adopt the kerning, compression and font substitution values of the new computer, which may alter the layout without warning (cut-off/hidden type is a common Publisher issue when paragraphs break at the wrong spot and the article ends abruptly in mid-sentence).

PDFs tend to be the safest choice for sending basic black ink jobs to a colleague, customer–or the printer. If you create color jobs for full-color digital presses or copiers, PDFs still tend to be your best bet. The problem arises when you have large print run projects that have to be run on presses in “spot” colors to be cost-efficient. By default, Word and Publisher don’t handle spot colors well and PDFs created from these programs give erratic results when you try to separate spot colors.

If you are planning a project that makes use of a spot color (e.g., uses black and a blue ink) please contact us to discuss options which will make spot color printing reliable and cost-effective.

If you don’t have a PDF writing program, you can download cutePDF for free. This and other free programs don’t have quite the reliability of the true Adobe product, so be sure to compare the results to your original file.

Metro

If you are sending us native Publisher files, please use the Publisher “Pack and Go” command to assemble the fonts and graphics into a folder and use a compression utility such as Winzip to compress all files into a single file. You can then upload this file to our FTP terminal. Please visit the Send Files portion of our website for details.

The Postal Service is implementing the Flats Sequencing System to fully automate the processing and delivery sequencing of flat-size mail. FSS can sort flats into delivery sequence, increasing efficiency by reducing carriers’ time manually sorting mail and allowing them to begin delivering mail earlier in the day.

Standardized addressing benefits the overall flats mailstream – from efficient processing to delivery. The new requirements, effective March 29, were outlined in the May/June 2008 MailPro.

More information can be found here.

Mailers needing guidance on specific mailpiece designs are encouraged to work with their local mailpiece design analyst (MDA). To locate the MDA near you, go to pe.usps.com and click Postal Locator, then Mailpiece Design Analyst.

As you may already know, new first class postage rates go into effect May 11. The rates are as follows:

• Postcard - $0.28
• 1 oz. - $0.44
• 2 oz. - $0.61
• 3 oz. - $0.78

Rates for Standard Mail Letters and Flats for both Profit and Non-Profit mailings has also been affected. For a more complete rate chart, please go to Metro’s website.