Say you own a small business and want to start marketing through direct mail but you don’t know where to start.
The U.S. Postal Service wants to help, with services like the free booklet “The Guide to Mailing for Businesses and Organizations.” It will tell you what services are available — and how to save money on them.
For example, let’s say you’re mailing 1,000 pieces in your local area for a cost of about $150. The booklet advises you to:
- Mail two to four times a year to make the mailings more cost effective.
- Pre-print mailing labels with a $150-a-year permit imprint so you won’t be charged for postage until you enter your mail at a Bulk Mail Entry Unit.
- Purchase inexpensive presort software that provides address labels with barcodes in presort sequence and mailing documentation. This can let you mail at the lower automation rate and save as much as eight cents per piece.
- Take your mailing to a Bulk Mail Entry Unit located in a postal service Sectional Center Facility, which will process mail on its way to the delivery post office. This qualifies you for an additional Destination Sectional Center Facility discount.
This guide also gives the skinny on all sorts of things, like how to get volume discounts. While many think this is only available to only the really, really big mailers, you can get discounts for standard mail volumes as small 200 pieces and first class volumes as small as 500, according to USPS officials.
The manual also includes tidbits like when it makes sense to accept mail at one post office from where your permit is not necessarily issued and truck it to another.
Or, if you’re a small mailer targeting your local area, you probably want to know that it pays to presort.
Under certain circumstances, a SOHO operation can send out 100 letters locally, paying only 1.8 cents per piece versus 3.5 cents per piece if they don’t, say other industry sources.
If you still need help, you can always turn to mailing agents, according to the USPS. These businesses can perform everything from lettershop services to picking up mail, transporting them to bulk mail centers, advising them on strategies and so forth. These companies can be found locally in the yellow pages or online.
Check out www.usps.com/homearea/sitedirectory.htm#small for more information on what services the USPS offers smaller mailers.
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