As the clock on 2016 ticks down, there might be some outstanding “to-dos” on your list. There’s still time left to end 2016 on a high note and get 2017 off to a good start. But where do you start? It can feel overwhelming. Keep calm and read on.
1.) Talk With Your Document Composition Partner
Your document composition partner can help you take advantage of USPS promotions. For example a transactional mailer doing 100,000 pieces per day can put $200,000 per year back on their bottom line, with the right help.
Paul Abdool, Vice President of Enterprise Solutions at Solimar Systems identified four key challenges along the way, “The challenges (of the promotion) fell into four categories: time to execute, lack of internal collaboration, inflexible processes and lack of know-how and tools.” Overcome these obstacles by talking with your document composition partner about what opportunities exist and incorporate promotional ideas into your 2017 planning.
2.) Prepare for Better Automation
Many of the printers and mailing service providers don’t realize all of the automation opportunities available to them. They think their jobs are specialized, or too many of their projects are one-off to invest in examining an automation processes.
A service provider using our automation solutions found the opposite to be true. “We were so impressed with it that we made all kinds of other uses for it. We are looking for every opportunity we can to use it. Even for a job that’s different each time, there’s still steps that are repetitive, such as printing forms or outputting files. More and more, we’re automating jobs that are not routine. That’s where we’ve gone.”
For help starting to analyze your workflow, we’ve created a free scoping document. Step-by-step, you can create a framework to discuss possible pain points that might be solved by automation with your solution providers.
3.) Learn How to Profit From Reducing UAA
CASS processing does a good job with most of your addresses. The average mailing has 5 percent of the addresses that are likely to be undeliverable as addressed (UAA). You have access to additional services to resolve those addresses: getting the pieces delivered and reducing postage.
An executive from DX Marketing explains, “We stress to our clients that if you’re going to analyze the mailing to see how successful it was, you’ve got to do everything possible to get the message to your target audience. You have to go that one step further to find out what those apartment or suite numbers are, or correct primary numbers and ARS helps to do that.”
Chris Lien is president of BCC Software, and has been active in the mailing industry for over 20 years. During that time, he authored several software solutions utilizing Mail.dat for electronic auditing, distribution and logistics planning, palletization, and electronic postage payment. He has been heavily involved in industry associations such as the Association for Postal Commerce, EPICOMM, Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers, and Idealliance. Mr. Lien also serves as the elected Immediate Past Industry Chair for the Postmaster General’s Mailers Technical Advisory Committee.
