Most mailing services I’ve learned about through the years could benefit from stepping up their marketing efforts. Often these companies have small management teams with no one dedicated to

I don’t think it takes a great deal of insight to predict the path of direct mail over the short term. If you’ve read this column for a while, you’ll know I’ve advocated for...

If your organization is creating and distributing paper and electronic bills for your clients, who's handling the payments? Does it make sense to offer payment processing to your cl

You might call it a disaster recovery (DR) plan, redundant operations, or business continuity strategy, but your mail center should have something in place that allows you to continue processi

Back when I was in the print/mail service bureau business, we won contracts to process a company's transactional documents by doing it cheaper than their current provider. Investments we’d

What is your company doing to boost customer loyalty? Are you keeping clients informed about what's going on in the mailing industry? Suggesting ways to improve the effectiveness of their cam

Precision in mail delivery is becoming more important to retailers, event promoters, and others who depend on direct mail to inform and motivate their audiences. As more organizations leverage

There may still be some cases when sending a single version of a mailer to everyone on the mailing list makes sense. But for most marketing campaigns, this blasting approach is an antiquated p

For the most part, print/mail service providers are at the mercy of their clients regarding the accuracy of the data they receive. Companies that print and mail transactional documents can't

The mailing industry has traditionally relied on large batch jobs. Mailers receive a name and address list or print image file from an internal or external client. They create letters, transac

Many print and mail operations are doing business today with old equipment, legacy software, and outdated processes. It's too expensive to update everything. My experience with print/mail ser

Concerns about the environment are on the rise and consumers expect brands to be responsive to climate change, according to this article in the Wall Street Journal. For some, the direct mail m

Though the technology has been available for a long time, some companies handling critical business documents like bills, statements, notices, or insurance claims are inserting documents into

B2B companies have long relied on email and in-person events for lead generation. The pandemic changed all that. The glut of emails businesspeople now receive every day makes it difficult for

When the USPS can’t deliver First-Class mail, it returns it to the mailer. Somewhere in every corporate mail center sits a stack of mail trays stuffed with returned mail. This has been a pro

On the surface, postal addresses seem they are just a means of getting mail from one place to another. If you're in the mailing business, you may think about addresses in only these terms. Bu

Outsourcing outbound mail operations has been a topic of discussion for decades at companies that produce their own mail. The popularity of outsourcing swings one way or the other, but never i

Print/mail service providers and in-plants must rely on the data their customers provide. Though it's not always the greatest quality, some shops are reluctant to touch the customer data, eve

QR codes got off to a shaky start when first introduced as marketing tools. Marketers did a poor job at using them and consumers either didn't know what to do with them or they found them inc

When I was working in the service bureau business early in my career, I had no software that allowed me to rearrange text on documents or make other adjustments to print-image files. Such prog