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

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