How to save on postage, Part 2

Following on to my last post about saving on postage, this post looks at getting the most of out existing discounts.

Get the most out of existing discounts

There are many ways for mailers with mid- to high-volume applications to receive a lower postage cost. The postal service rewards mailers with discounts for doing some of their work prior to submitting mail. In particular, worksharing discounts are available when a mailer validates and standardizes addresses, preventing undeliverable-as-addressed mailpieces from entering the mailstream.

Many of these discounts are tied to a new regulation being driven by the United States Postal Service® (USPS®) – the Intelligent Mail® barcode (IMB).

Address cleansing and sorting

Some mailers either can’t correct the addresses they receive (for example, they just process the list of recipients and have no control over it), and others don’t cleanse their mailing lists because they don’t have the technology to do so.

For those who can’t correct addresses, the best cost-saving approach is to identify undeliverable mailpieces before they are submitted to the postal system. New technologies that help with this use the power of vision system reading and USPS database lookups at machine speed.

So even though a mailer may not be able to control whether the address is correct, they can determine whether the mailpiece will get to the recipient. With this information, they have the power to pull the mailpiece from the entire mailing. This approach saves money in two ways: by avoiding having non-compliant mailpieces incur penalties, and saving money by not applying the price of postage to an undeliverable mailpiece.

Mailers who do have the ability to correct their addresses can reduce their postage costs by leveraging technology – either pre-print or during sorting – to satisfy postal requirements for address cleansing and mail sortation, ensuring that submitted mailpieces are deliverable and already grouped by destination.

Other benefits include timely delivery, which can satisfy government and industry requirements in industries such as banking and financial services, and has the possibility of lowering the float of payments by speeding the round-trip cycle.