Postal Rates on the Rise
Six Simple Steps to Offset Postal Hikes

As healthcare providers reach out to the community to attract new patients, build patient loyalty, showcase new services, recruit healthcare professionals and attract donors to their foundations, a significant amount of money is expended on newsletters and promotional mailings.

Despite the increased use of the Internet, the United States Postal Service still delivers hundreds of billions of pieces of mail annually. With the recent 5.1 percent increase1 to postal rates, there’s a substantial incentive to examine your communication strategies.

The following are six simple steps you can take to offset the postal hikes and hold the line on your marketing expense.
  1. Plan your Mailpiece In addition to weight, the new postal rate structure puts a greater emphasis on size and shape.  With proper planning, you can implement creative design/kitting/folding/inserting services that could actually create an opportunity for savings, all based on your organization’s marketing objectives and budgetary considerations.
     
  2. Pay Attention to Shape Previously, letters, flats and parcels over 1-ounce had the same price at every weight increment.  The new rate design recognizes that each of these shapes has substantially different processing costs and should have separate prices.
     
  3. Pay Attention to Size   In addition, think about the size of the envelope you’re using.  Could that flyer or letter be folded to fit a standard #10 envelope?  Under the new rates, switching from a flat (9” x 12”) envelope to the #10 envelope will lower processing costs.
     
  4. Optimize Productivity   Strong financial incentive also exists for combining multiple communications into a single envelope.  By adding inserts or “cross-selling” materials into regularly-distributed materials, you could increase mailpiece productivity.
     
  5. Sort Out the Savings The type of presorting you employ can offset the effect the postal rate increase has on your organization’s budget.  Whether in-house presorting or partnering with a high-quality mailing presorter is your preferred method, the new first-class mail presort rate is nearly two cents less than today’s single piece rate – and even lower rates are available at the 3- or 5-digit presort levels.
     
  6. Keep a Clean List Millions of Americans change their address each year.  As your database ages, your organization could be wasting valuable marketing dollars mailing to invalid addresses.  The Postal Service’s new address quality rules will raise the bar on providing discounts pertaining to address quality. This makes it even more important to take advantage of address quality software and list cleansing processes to ensure mailing addresses are NCOA2 and CASS3 certified.

The rate increases represent an opportunity to take a fresh look at the entire mailstream process, identifying opportunities to minimize the costs and maximize the effectiveness of customer communications.

For additional information on how you can transform patient and marketing communications to beat postage costs, contact us today.  Our subject matter experts can provide you strategic direction and practical advice on everything from paper and printing, to postage and distribution.  

 

1  In January of 2006, the Postal Rate Commission announced a 5.4 percent postal rate increase.  The cost of a first-class stamp increased two cents, to $0.39, and the remainder of presorted and bulk mail rates increased, as well.  Even on the heels of this rate hike, yet another increase took effect on May 14, 2007, bringing the cost of a first-class stamp to $0.41 and organizations scrambling for ways to cut costs. 

2  NCOA: National Change of Address

3  CASS:  Coding Accuracy Support System