Trim Costs After the Postal Rate Increase

Use selective binding. If you have several versions of your catalog differentiated by dot whacks or variant covers or signatures, selective binding by your printer could drop your postage costs significantly. Minnick gives an example: Carrier route discounts kick in for mailings greater than 500,000. If you have three lists of 500,000 customers (or less), none of the mailings based on these lists would qualify for the discount. Using a binding machine to create a single mailing of non-identical books would create one mailing of 1.5 million. Roughly 55 percent of the mailing now qualifies for a discount of 6.7 cents per piece. Spread across your whole mailing, that’s a savings of $36.85/M. Minnick notes that selective binding typically costs $3/M to $5/M, so the added cost more than pays for itself.