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

Eventually, your organization will change the software that generates the documents you send to customers. Your company may upgrade to a new version of the current document composition softwar

When was the last time your organization did a customer communication audit? If it's been a few years, or if you've never looked at all your customer communications as a whole, now would be

What do you sell? If you said 'mailing services', you've got lots of company. Try typing 'mailing services near me' into Google and you’ll see how many web pages are vying for attention

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

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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

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

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