Mike Porter

President, Print/Mail Consultants
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May 20 2022
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
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May 2 2022
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
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April 5 2022
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
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March 14 2022
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
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Feb. 24 2022
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
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Feb. 1 2022
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
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Jan. 27 2022
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
people and envelopes
Jan. 5 2022
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
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Dec. 8 2021
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
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Nov. 12 2021
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
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Oct. 5 2021
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
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Sept. 8 2021
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
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Aug. 23 2021
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
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Aug. 1 2021
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...
Porter Insurance DM 1920 x 1005
July 5 2021
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
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June 28 2021
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
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May 11 2021
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
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May 4 2021
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
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April 6 2021
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
incoming mail
Feb. 28 2021
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

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