Mike Porter

President, Print/Mail Consultants
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Feb. 10 2020
The Postal Service’s financial woes are well known. The problems are complex, but some say postal banking could be a new revenue stream that helps the USPS out of its money problems
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Dec. 12 2019
As organizations devote more resources to developing electronic messaging, I’ve been thinking about what would happen if print wasn’t part of the customer communications landscape. Some...
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Nov. 4 2019
A popular buzzword in the printing industry is “convergence,” which describes efforts by printing companies to expand into areas adjacent to their traditional product lines. Print companie
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Oct. 29 2019
If nothing’s wrong with your print and mail operation, why should you change it? We’ve all probably suffered through painful experiences when attempts to improve a process resulted in disr
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Oct. 7 2019
What is the impact to your organization if an average transactional document, such as a bill, gets damaged during the inserting operation in your print and mail facility? How much could such a
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Sept. 13 2019
Companies in the printing and mailing business have a problem. To potential clients, organizations like these all look the same. Customers expect anyone they entrust with their transactional
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Sept. 10 2019
Over the last couple of years, analysts and vendors have written much about workflow systems. Software vendors refer to these solutions as dashboards or integration platforms. This is software
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Sept. 1 2019
Unless you are truly “off the grid,” you’re living in a tech world with the rest of us. You’ve probably got personal experience with online banking, shopping, ride sharing, social...
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Aug. 15 2019
I’ve been attending industry events and conferences lately, covering various aspects of the document industry, including transactional print, commercial print, and mailing. While the
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July 8 2019
Everyone has a different idea about the impact of undelivered mail. Most times, the estimates are way too low. The cost of paper, ink, and wasted postage is just the start, so I prefer to look a
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June 26 2019
Print and mail operations use tracking systems like automated document factory (ADF) software to monitor and record work as it processes through the shop. These systems are particularly importan
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May 10 2019
The owners of business communications used to be the IT department. Statements and bills, notices, policies, welcome kits, etc. were all generated by buttoned-down software applications managed
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April 18 2019
When should you buy new inserting equipment? That’s an excellent question. Don’t automatically assume new inserters are the best solution for problems you might have in the mail cen
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April 5 2019
Print and mail operations everywhere hear about paperless conversion from their internal or external clients. On the surface, this idea sounds like an easy decision for businesses issuing transa
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March 25 2019
Will you need to add employees to your operation this year? As industry veterans start to “age out” and retire, many document operations executives face the challenge of replacing experience
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March 20 2019
It seems most of the emphasis in customer experience these days is on websites, social media, online shopping, and internet customer portals. Those all play important parts in the overall custom
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March 15 2019
Websites are still important marketing tools, so have you looked at yours recently? An unscientific audit of random print/mail service provider websites by this author revealed plenty of improvement o
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Jan. 25 2019
Data mining sounds geeky and complicated, but document service providers can use information extracted from their clients’ print image files to improve messaging, lower costs, or make document
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Jan. 8 2019
Print and mail service providers may believe hackers aren’t interested in the customer data they use to create and distribute documents. Compared to financial institutions and healthcare provi
Dec. 14 2018
Print and mail service providers understand they need to stay in contact with their current and future customers to keep the revenue flowing. I recommend reaching out about once a month, but that's a

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