Mailing/Fulfillment - Postal Trends

Gain strategic insight to the trends within the market and technology innovations you need to remain highly competitive.

Through a mutual partnership, Ricoh Production Print Solutions and TEC Mailing Solutions will provide cloud-based support for critical mailing output enabling cost-savings and automated, streamlined workflow throughout a broad range of print and mail operations. Representatives from both companies will be at the National Postal Forum, this week, showcasing their portfolio of mail processing solutions.

At the National Postal Forum in San Francisco this week, Postmaster General and CEO Patrick R. Donahoe said that technology and changing consumer expectations are helping to transform mail into an even more powerful communications channel. “With imbedded QR codes and augmented reality, mail becomes much more functional and creative, creating an even more influential experience.”

A new report has been released by the Panel of the National Academy of Public Administration, that advocates that mail processing, collection, and transportation be performed by private-sector companies and that the delivery function—“the last mile”—be reserved for the USPS.The

Keeping an open mind, recognizing profit potential and identifying a point of entry was all the fodder that Quad/Graphics needed to embark on its mobile technologies platform, Interactive Print Solutions (IPS). Actually, it was a direct result of QIC (Quad Idea Catapult)—the company's innovation process management framework—vetting the technologies and creating IPS as a vehicle toward delivering mobile technologies to customers. It helps that Quad/Graphics CEO Joel Quadracci not only gave the endeavor his full blessing, but acts as an evangelist for the mobile technologies.

Direct mail is still considered the marketing channel of choice by a vast number of marketers across verticals ranging from telecom and utilities to nonprofit, publishing and financial services. According to the Direct Marketing Association's “2012 Response Rate Report,” the rates for letter-sized direct mail (3.4 percent) were 30 times higher than those for email (0.12 percent). The belief that direct mail is dead or dying will have to be suspended for the time being.

During July and August, the Postal Service is offering a 2-percent discount on Standard Mail and First-Class Mail that includes a two-dimensional barcode or other print/mobile technology. Mailers must register for the Mobile Commerce and Personalization Promotion by Aug. 30.

The deeper an in-plant can weave itself into the fabric of its parent organization, the better off it will be. Knowing this, some in-plants are endearing themselves to customers by offering fulfillment services, saving those customers from having to do this work themselves.

So you're shopping around for vendors, software and services to replace your current Web platform. Several questions no doubt go through your mind.

What are the features and functions we need? How can we use social media? Should we investigate SaaS or acquire a license and host our own solution? Or should we use a service to host?

What will the cost be? What are the due diligence steps we need to take with the vendor to make a sound decision?

When it comes to order fulfillment and customer service, most multichannel marketers keep it inhouse. Just 20% use an outside service for fulfillment, according to Multichannel Merchant's Outlook 2010 Survey on Operations & Fulfillment, and only 4% of respondents that don't are considering it.

About the same percentage of survey respondents (22%) use an outside provider for call center services, while 14% are considering it.