At the end of 2015, I wrote an article that was an attempt to help the postal industry plan for what would be in store for 2016. One year later, I am attempting the same feat as I look into a ve... View More

I’ve been in the direct mail industry for nearly 20 years. And I can count on one hand -- okay, one finger -- how many times postage rates have gone down in the last two decades. They usually... View More

Big Data can be a scary proposition for seasoned professionals in the customer communications business. It sounds like something that requires a PhD to figure out. What analysts refer to as Big... View More

According to a recent McKinsey report, “automation can enable businesses to improve performance by reducing errors and improving quality and speed, and in some cases achieving outcomes that go... View More

In our annual holiday greeting video, I spoke to our customers and partners about how 2016 was a year of investments. Naturally, when people hear the word “investment,” they think large capi

It’s easy to forget how much a damaged piece of mail can cost a business producing transactional mail. Time, resources and trust are all affected every time a pair of hands touches a sin... View More

Big data gets a lot of press, as it should. How organizations acquire and use data affects how they manage customer communications across all channels. Most of the articles about Big Data, howev... View More

When we talk about mail piece design with clients, it’s usually in the context of driving response. Successful direct marketers balance the cost of various aspects of mail piece design with th... View More

The heightened priority of organizations in every industry to focus on the customer experience, reflected in the augmentation of marketing roles to include Chief Customer Officers (CCOs) and Chief Exp

The reasons for unsatisfactory throughput numbers are as varied as the document operations experiencing them. Every shop is different and so are the remedies, but they aren’t always easy to... View More

In my last column, I talked about how to effectively deal with end of year shipping demands. Office shippers may not have huge holiday sending output, but the massive volume carriers face impact... View More

What a year 2016 was for the mail industry! The ever-growing increase of digital communications (and its impact on physical mail), the adoption of more and more shipping duties among mailers, compliance... View More

The time is now for mail tracking and reporting. The USPS wants to shake its long-standing image as a “black hole” where mail gets lost and cannot be seen until it shows up in the delivery... View More

Postal rates are supposed to be tied to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which today is running at one to two percent. Although the overall increase may be in this range, we found that certain ra... View More

Nearly all organizations create informational content. Content marketing experts define informational content as material that has value on its own. No one has to buy a product or sign up for an... View More

PC Postage is one of the fastest growth segments in the mailing industry and is something every type of organization may want to consider to handle at least some or all of their volumes. With ad... View More

Do you want both you and your team to rise to new levels of achievement and success? Embracing goal setting may be the tool you need. Goal setting is the process of developing outcomes (goals) t... View More

In a previous article, we discussed the importance of building a business case to get approval from senior management for a major expense or transformation. In many situations, managers may be a... View More

A few weeks back, I was signing a couple of hundred letters to Congress urging members to review and enact legislation that would allow the United States Postal Service to improve efficiency, ma... View More

If I had a dime for every small business owner I’ve seen try direct mail, only to quickly throw up their hands and declare that it didn’t work, I’d have a mountain of dimes. I’m... View More