Mike Porter

President, Print/Mail Consultants
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Oct. 5 2021
Back when I began my service bureau career, we were all about batch processing. It was the era of big iron where we wrote custom programs that executed on mainframe computers and generated mou
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Sept. 8 2021
Eleven years ago, I wrote an article for this magazine about the document industry's environmental efforts. The article pointed out that during a recession, economic strategies were likely to
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Aug. 23 2021
Almost all business units in today's corporations are looking to automate their processes as much as possible. COVID-19 taught us that relying on human-dependent manual tasks made it difficult to car
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Aug. 1 2021
You may describe the company for which you work as being in the printing business, or the mailing business. “Marketing services provider” might describe your employer, or perhaps simply...
Porter Insurance DM 1920 x 1005
July 5 2021
In the days of offset print, unintelligent mail inserting machines, and COBOL document generation programs, sending every customer the same generic information was all print and mail professio
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June 28 2021
Inserts (bill stuffers) have been a mainstay of transactional documents like bills and statements for a long time. But it’s time to reconsider inserts as a way to deliver offers and messages to cust
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May 11 2021
Most people would agree that an envelope's purpose is safely transporting the contents from sender to recipient. But the envelope has another important job — getting opened! Magazine and cata
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May 4 2021
Dimensional direct mail marketing, packages that have a third-dimensional aspect in addition to the length and width of a letter or postcard, enjoy outstanding conversion rates. These pieces s
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April 6 2021
What if there was a customer communication technology that guaranteed consistent formatting and presentation of your documents, regardless of the devices owned by your customers? Screen size w
incoming mail
Feb. 28 2021
In many corporate mail centers, the handling of inbound mail is still a mostly manual operation. Clerks look at packages, flats, letters, and magazines and sort them down to courier routes. Su
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Feb. 16 2021
"If I'm not in the document business," you might say, "How do you explain the pallets full of paper and envelopes sitting all over my shop?" OK, that’s a reasonable question. W
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Feb. 2 2021
Companies are focusing on customer experience and the customer journey, and more of them are working on creating a single customer view, but their efforts don't always include mailed communic
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Jan. 11 2021
The coronavirus has made a mess of the employment landscape, but companies in the print and mail industry can’t afford to sit around and wait for things to get back to normal. No one knows h
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Dec. 18 2020
Data enhancement means adding value to data you'll be using to produce and mail documents processed through your print and mail center. In most shops, data enhancement ends with correcting po
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Nov. 2 2020
Lowering the cost to produce and mail transactional customer communications has always been a focus for in-plant and outsource print/mail service providers. Finding ways to reduce postage and
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Oct. 12 2020
I’m a big believer in content marketing — the practice of attracting leads and nurturing them from introduction through purchase by creating and distributing informational content composed
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Oct. 5 2020
Customers view print and mail service providers as interchangeable. When they do that, the only distinguishing factor from the customer point of view is price, which means outsource service pr
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Sept. 25 2020
For decades, companies have struggled with the best way to create and distribute business documents. Should they print, mail, and distribute digital communications themselves or outsource the
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Aug. 3 2020
When was the last time your mail center employees got recognized for their efforts that enable cash flow, support customer retention, or attract new customers to the business? This group of de
envelopes
July 27 2020
Do mailing jobs where clients aren’t concerned with the disposition of each mail piece still exist? If so, I suspect they are disappearing. Other than saturation-type mailings or Every Door

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