Shipping

Next March, the USPS will implement new delivery address placement and format requirements for flats, the size of mail that most catalogs are classified under. The requirements will apply to ALL catalogs and not just those destined for postal facilities that will have the new Flats Sequencing System machines that the USPS will begin deploying this fall. And this is regardless of how flats are presorted, whether they’re barcoded or where they entered the mailstream. The best way to look at these issues is literally to have your own catalogs in front of you so you can see what changes may need to

To our readers, this is a personal and highly opinionated message from your industry publication’s editor-in-chief. We at Catalog Success strive to bring you objective and implemental money-making ideas, and it’s quite rare I’d ever outwardly promote anything, although you’ll notice that in the past few editions we’ve been aggressively promoting an exciting upcoming seminar we’re co-presenting with F. Curtis Barry & Co. (see the Ops Tip of the Week for further details). But I want to take a time-out from our usual efforts to plug something special here that’s also in your best interests. Specifically, it’s an upcoming postal event in Washington,

Whitepaper Provides Cost-Saving Postal Optimization Tips

Catalogers seeking ways to cut their postal bills should consider postal optimization, a system to address their foremost concern, postage costs. According to a recent whitepaper distributed by the consulting firm Winterberry Group and sponsored by the Direct Group, postal optimization entails coordinating technologies, processes and physical formats with one goal in mind: reducing postage costs. This system takes advantage of two categories: volume and work-sharing discounts. Below are some tips from the whitepaper to help catalogers cut postage costs. 1. Commingling. This tactic combines direct mail from various marketers into a single mailstream to secure the highest volume and work-sharing discounts for

As per my headline, for this issue of Catalog Success: The Corner View, I hand my pen — um, keyboard — over to Catalog Success E-Commerce Insights columnist Alan Rimm-Kaufman. Alan heads the Rimm-Kaufman Group, an online agency providing large-scale paid search bid management and Web site testing services, and was formerly a marketing executive with the Crutchfield catalog of consumer electronics. I leave the stage to Alan, who starts with a potential scenario followed by nine predictions for the future of the catalog/multichannel business as it affects you. Scene: A bar at a conference hotel during a marketing trade show. Bill:

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