Shipping

Before I delve into a touchy environmental issue, let me be totally up-front about my own political views as a consumer (without my chief editor hat on): I lean heavily to the left. I voted for Sen. Obama in the New York primary (although my finger was leaning on Sen. Clinton’s key in that booth just before it moved to Obama’s). I wanted to put that out on the table publicly, because the tone of my column might seem to go in the opposite direction. You have been warned. That said, if I’m turning off any of our right-leaning readers, I hope

The U.S. Postal Service recently promised to delay the required implementation of the Intelligent Mail Barcode (IMB) for all letters and flats until May 2009 and will allow mailers to continue to access a yet-to-be-determined automation price by using POSTNET barcodes until May 2010. The USPS also said the two options it proposed for using IMBs — basic and full-service — will have separate prices. The announcement came in response to a barrage of comments from mailers opposing the original January 2009 requirement to use IMBs only (i.e., no POSTNET barcodes allowed) to qualify for automation prices. The USPS published its proposed IMB requirements

It’s fashionable these days for catalog companies to replace their CEOs. No fewer than six major catalogers have done so this year. And there may be plenty of others among smaller companies that can’t easily be tracked. Certainly the job life-expectancy of a CEO is short, but this wholesale change of leadership isn’t usual. CEOs can be dismissed for a variety of reasons, of course. The most common one is a company’s poor financial performance. While in the past a board of directors may have been more content to ride out a downturn in profitability, these days boards increasingly demand immediate results. Environmental

If you mail at automation-discounted postal rates, your catalog will have to meet a host of new requirements next January, including the USPS’s Intelligent Mail Barcode (IMB). The USPS last month issued its proposed rules on the requirements that go along with automation rates starting in January 2009. It goes beyond the IMB, although that in and of itself is a significant change. The Postal Service’s proposed rules would no longer allow the POSTNET barcode, which has been in use for nearly two decades, to qualify for automation discounts beginning in January 2009. It’s not clear what will happen to pieces

Earlier this month, catalogers and other businesses that rely so heavily on the USPS realized a “dream” more than a dozen years in the making. They were “treated” to their first postal rate adjustment under the new postal reform law. Under its new rate-making powers, giving it the freedom to set rates as long as they’re no greater than consumer price index (CPI) levels, the USPS announced the increase for noncarrier route flats, the key catalog category, would be less than 1 percent. The worst news was that it would take effect this spring, just a year after the final postage increase under the

In the final part of this two-part series on helping catalogers realize maximum postal discounts, I’ll look at how to compare the differences in postal costs when comparing printers. I’ll also provide a checklist of questions you should be asking your printer to guarantee you’re maximizing your postal savings. (For part 1, click here.) Understanding potential postal savings is a critical part of comparing a printer’s total cost. Printing costs used to consist only of printing and paper costs. Now a third “p” has been added — postal costs. Print buyers need to know how to compare the differences in postage when comparing printers.

In its recent webinar, How Casual Male Keeps Customers Coming Back, international name and address software provider QAS, an Experian company, provided insight on how the multichannel merchant has profited from front-end address verification software and how the collection of incorrect address data can cause significant problems. Geoff McGehee, director of database marketing for the Casual Male Retail Group, reeled off several things his company has learned from acquiring customer addresses accurately and efficiently at the point of sale. Here are some of his observations. 1. Customer experience comes first. Customers want to receive the information they’ve signed up to receive, whether it be

In the first of this two-part series on helping catalogers realize maximum postal discounts, I’ll examine the various techniques you can use to save in postage — including co-binding, co-mailing and mail pools. Last year’s postal rate increase of almost 10 cents/piece left catalogers scrambling to offset the impact to their bottom lines. For many, printing has become an area to trim costs. Printers can deliver postal savings when mailing from their plants. Increased attention is focused on mail pool and co-mail programs. Postal savings can be realized in three unique ways: 1. Weekly destination-entry, drop-ship mail pools. Catalogers bind and address the

In announcing its formal backing of the recently created American Catalog Mailers Association (ACMA) on Dec. 18, NEMOA board members are making a bold statement that the half-year-old organization can best represent their 110-plus catalog members’ interests, particularly in postal matters, going forward. Positioning itself as a catalogers-only group, ACMA is also focused on do-not-mail legislation and privacy. “ACMA will represent our specific needs relative to postal affairs, do-not-mail, privacy, environmental [policies] and whatever else comes our way over the coming year,” says Jon Fleischmann, president/CEO of the Potpourri Group and a NEMOA board member. Fleischmann believes potential benefits offered by the ACMA include

There’s that old Bob Dylan song about times a-changin’ that I won’t bother to quote further. But it seems to hold true moreso year after year, and 2008 is no exception. So while some of us continue to exchange “happy new year” greetings with one another, I’ll send along one last new year’s greeting with what I believe to be the top five actions you should act on, examine or just ponder to bring your catalog/multichannel business in sync with the times. 1. Get your matchback system working smoothly at once. Assign someone in either your marketing or operations departments to do nothing