Mike Porter

President, Print/Mail Consultants
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May 10 2019
The owners of business communications used to be the IT department. Statements and bills, notices, policies, welcome kits, etc. were all generated by buttoned-down software applications managed
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April 18 2019
When should you buy new inserting equipment? That’s an excellent question. Don’t automatically assume new inserters are the best solution for problems you might have in the mail cen
paper in trash
April 5 2019
Print and mail operations everywhere hear about paperless conversion from their internal or external clients. On the surface, this idea sounds like an easy decision for businesses issuing transa
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March 25 2019
Will you need to add employees to your operation this year? As industry veterans start to “age out” and retire, many document operations executives face the challenge of replacing experience
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March 20 2019
It seems most of the emphasis in customer experience these days is on websites, social media, online shopping, and internet customer portals. Those all play important parts in the overall custom
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March 15 2019
Websites are still important marketing tools, so have you looked at yours recently? An unscientific audit of random print/mail service provider websites by this author revealed plenty of improvement o
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Jan. 25 2019
Data mining sounds geeky and complicated, but document service providers can use information extracted from their clients’ print image files to improve messaging, lower costs, or make document
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Jan. 8 2019
Print and mail service providers may believe hackers aren’t interested in the customer data they use to create and distribute documents. Compared to financial institutions and healthcare provi
Dec. 14 2018
Print and mail service providers understand they need to stay in contact with their current and future customers to keep the revenue flowing. I recommend reaching out about once a month, but that's a
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Dec. 10 2018
Some of the most common causes of HIPAA violations are compliance problems associated with what the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) calls “willful neglect.” The OCR is a government entity
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Dec. 4 2018
As documents become more personalized, containing variable text blocks, graphics, offers, and individual recipient data, the risk of creating documents with errors increases
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Nov. 16 2018
The first jobs run on your new inkjet press are likely to be legacy applications previously run on toner-based printers or offset presses. That's not a bad strategy. You’ll be starting with s
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Sept. 10 2018
Does your company create documents containing information like patient health data, credit card transactions, or student records? Is some of that mail occasionally undeliverable?
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Aug. 29 2018
Clients of print/mail service providers aren't usually customer communication experts. They view their vendors as the last steps in a process. Data goes in, and mail comes out. When it comes to
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Aug. 6 2018
Suppose a client sends you a common name and address list. Your instructions are to merge the data with a marketing letter, stuff it into window envelopes, and mail the job. If you do those step
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July 30 2018
Ever since multi-station mail inserting machines were invented, mailers have struggled with pre-printed inserts. Mailing operations must receive the inserts, add them to inventory, stage them for prod
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July 16 2018
Print and mail operations job documentation can be a nuisance. As jobs change, keeping records up to date is a chore. Documentation is usually the last thing service providers address as they develop
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May 29 2018
If you believe your monochrome toner printers should get you through the next couple of years, think again. The customer communications business is transforming. Money is pouring into research and dev
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April 30 2018
I recall discussing customer data quality with a print/mail service provider sales rep. "It's not our problem," he explained. "We print what they send. If the data is bad, that's their problem."
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April 19 2018
Most organizations view the effort to produce and distribute transactional documents as a necessary cost of doing business. Money spent on paper, printers, inserting equipment, postage, and production

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