Jaki Gaudet

We know putting the cart before the horse is no good, well the same goes with printing a direct mail piece before it's approved to mail.

Designing direct marketing postcards and other pieces is a challenge these days. The USPS has been struggling with lower mail volumes and increased costs. As a result, they are forced to change the way they operate to help cut costs.

It's important to work with a designer and marketing communications company that has postal knowledge and a process in place that has their work reviewed by experts prior to it going to press. If that isn’t happening it could cost you thousands of dollars and require you to re-design, re-print, or even pay more than you intended to on postage.  

Our print fulfillment department noticed several hiccups regarding mailing guidelines and requirements. Some of these were as a result of the USPS regulation changes, and others came from outside vendors who made decisions on paper weights and sizes without understanding how the postage of the piece would be impacted. Here are some issues we had to resolve:

Postal regulations changed. One customer had to spend an additional $1,200 to send welcome cards that did not meet the USPS’s aspect ratio requirements.

Paper weight. One client had an outside vendor design their piece and select the paper weight. The weight caused them to spend thousands of dollars more in postage than they had budgeted for,

Layout. One client came to us with a piece designed backward (by the USPS’s standards) causing them to pay first class rates. Luckily, we were not only mailing but also printing this piece for them and notified them that with a simple flip of one panel, we could send it presorted first class, and save them thousands of dollars.

When our team begins the concept phase of any design we show it to our in-house fulfillment and mail experts. This gives them the chance to indicate areas of the piece that will either increase postage rates, not be mailable as is, or to point out ways in which we could change it to decrease postage. 

So avoid putting the design before the printing/mailing step. If you're currently having a direct mail campaign designed, then ask the design team what steps they take to ensure you have a unique piece, and one that can mail and at the postage you are expecting to pay.