Mailing/Fulfillment - Postal Trends

In financial trouble that has it on the brink of default, the U.S. Postal Service is making an aggressive appeal to catalogers and other advertisers to ramp up their mailings. The theory is that their revenue can make up for steep declines in first-class consumer and business mail that has migrated online.

The Postal Service is seeking to make direct mailing friendlier in hopes of luring more revenue by reaching out to new users. At present, only about 22 percent of businesses use direct mail. A new Post Office program targeting small businesses called “Every Door Direct Mail” allows marketers to

Imagine a nation without the Postal Service. No more birthday cards and bills or magazines and catalogs filling the mailbox. It's a worst-case scenario being painted for an organization that lost $8.5 billion in 2010 and seems headed deeper into the red this year.

The Postal Service is not going out of business," postal spokesman David Partenheimer said. "We will continue to deliver the mail as we have for more than 200 years. The postmaster general has developed a plan that will return the Postal Service to financial stability. We continue to do what we can on our own to achieve

FundRaising Success magazine is pleased to announce the winners of its 2011 Gold Awards for Fundraising Excellence. Top prize this year went to the World Vision Back to School Bounceback “Flight” package, which won Package of the Year and the Gold Award in the Direct-Mail Category.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will hold a hearing on the agency’s predicament on Tuesday. So far, feuding Democrats and Republicans in Congress, still smarting from the brawl over the federal debt ceiling, have failed to agree on any solutions. It doesn’t help that many of the options for saving the postal service are politically unpalatable.

“The situation is dire,” said Thomas R. Carper, the Delaware Democrat who is chairman of the Senate subcommittee that oversees the postal service. “If we do nothing, if we don’t react in a smart, appropriate way, the postal service could literally close

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has launched SavingThePostalService.com to educate the public about the Postal Service’s financial troubles and some possible solutions. U.S. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe has said that the U.S. Postal Service will default on its obligations to the federal government on September 30, at the end of the current fiscal year.

PODi’s recent report, “Traffic Generation Solutions for the Retail Market,” reviews several successful applications, highlighting ideas that work and the results achieved. Chick-fil-A franchise owners in Covington, LA, needed a direct marketing solution to establish a customer database and increase store traffic.

The U.S. Postal Service’s estimate that its “workforce optimization” plan will require 120,000 layoffs in the next four years may be substantially understating the number of postal workers who would be forced out. The recently released plan calls for shedding 220,000 career employees over the next four years. It estimates that attrition will take care of 100,000 employees, meaning the rest of the cuts would have to come from layoffs.

The estimate accurately reflects recent trends, when the number of career employees declined by just over 25,000 in a 12-month period. But there’s a big reason not to project recent trends

Every Door Direct Mail, as the service is called, was launched back in April, offering businesses an easier way to mail items to every doorstep in a given area, without having to get hold of specific addresses for individual households. So far, the service has averaged more than 45,000 visits each month to its online tool, which allows users to simply select an area on a map in order to obtain numbers of households in targeted delivery routes.

Last week, the Postal Service revealed new figures stating that 12,097 customers have registered to use the new service...There have been 9,292 transactions

The mail industry in the United States now appears to be “too fragile” for the U.S. Postal Service to raise its postal rates by above-inflation amounts, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said. Speaking at the latest quarterly meeting of the USPS with its major customers and industry associations, Donahoe declared that the Postal Service is dropping its legal battle with regulators to force a 5.6 percent rate increase.

Donahoe advised mailers that when it comes to future rate increases “plan on no more-than-CPI increases.”

This week’s Mailers Technical Advisory Committee meeting at USPS headquarters was dominated by the bombshell announcement

Under Rep. Darrell Issa’s bill, the 40 percent discount that nonprofits have been getting for the postage rates on their mailings since Congress authorized it in 1951 would be reduced by 5 percent a year, and to 10 percent after six years.

It is part of a larger effort to overhaul the Postal Service, which is facing a second year of losses totaling $8 billion or more. The bill would establish a control board to restructure the Postal Service and reduce costs to get the agency back on track, saving at least $2 billion a year.