Special Report The 3Ps: Printing, Production and Paper

Co-mailing allows more catalogs to be mailed from a single ZIP string, he continues. “This results in more catalogs that qualify for the enhanced carrier route postal rate — 6.7 cents per catalog less than the next postal automation three- and five-digital presort level,” he notes.

Mark Schneider, manager of technical services at Quad/Graphics, says to think of co-mailings this way: “You’ve designed a catalog that’s going to have two covers — one that speaks to your house list and another to prospects. It may be a total run of 1 million or 500,000 each. You’d naturally think of this job as two separate mail streams, and the cost per piece for postage is about 25 cents.” Schneider continues, “If you ask, ‘Why don’t we co-mail these together, print them and demographically or selectively bind the covers and prepare distribution for them as we would a single list?’ the cost per piece for postage might be 23 cents. … You’re creating more efficient packages, pallets or containers for the USPS to handle.”