Mailing Your Printed Piece with Blossom – Postage Rates and Info – Part 1

22 Jun 2010 1 Comment

by Blossom in Uncategorized Tags: blossom, blossom publishing, mailing, mailing services, marketing strategy, self-mailers

As we’ve mentioned earlier, one of the best ways to win using Blossom is to do all your printing and mailing in one wheelhouse – not only will inkjetting your prospects’ names make your piece look more attractive, but it saves you the time and hassle of printing out and applying mailing labels yourself before going to the post office. Saving the time, trouble and money makes our mailing services well worth it… so you can keep on taking pictures.

How much does it actually cost for Blossom’s list and mailing services? How does the USPS price different sized postcards, bifolds, digests or magazines?

No matter what size you do pick, ultimately it depends. You can mail your piece First Class or Standard Rate.

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First Class or Standard Rate?

For most mailers, you can choose between First Class and Standard Rate mailing. The USPS handles each type differently; at the end of the day, when the postal workers are loading up the trucks, the first priority for them is First Class Mail. If they have time before the end of the day, that’s when they’ll get to the Standard Mail. Naturally, since First Class is higher on the ‘priority list,’ it costs a bit more than Standard Rates. In other words, the essential differences between the two are:

-First Class is slightly more expensive than Standard Rate.
-First Class mailers take usually 5-7 business days to reach their destination, while Standard Rate takes 7-10 business days.
-Bad addresses on first class mailers are ‘return to sender’ back to you, while bad addresses in Standard Rate mailers just get thrown out. One thing to consider if you’re doing multiple mailers with a purchased mailing list – first class on the first mailing could save you a lot of money down the road if we take the bad addresses off your mailing list before future mailings.
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Postcards

Blossom has six different sizes of postcards for you to choose from. However, in the world of the USPS, Blossom really only has three: small, standard and large. Each size is priced differently.

Small postcards are 4.125×5.5 postcards only. These postcards can only be mailed via First Class and postage is $0.26 per postcard (500 piece minimum). Compare that to $0.28/stamp if you apply postage yourself!

Standard postcards are any postcard that isn’t 8.5×11. All of these postcards cost the same, postage-wise: $0.31 for Bulk Rate, $0.40 for First Class (200 piece minimum). Think about this: If you normally send out 5.5×8.5 postcards, consider upgrading to a 6×11 – the printing costs aren’t much more money, and the postage is exactly the same! You’ll send a larger postcard to your customers – meaning more real estate to show your studio off – without spending much more money!

Large postcards are 8.5x11s. $0.55 for bulk rate, and $0.79 for First Class (also a 200 piece minimum).

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Inkjet Fees

In addition to USPS costs, we also perform CASS Certification (weeds out bad addresses from the mailing list) as well as National Change Of Address (NCOA) checks before every mailing. When the Post Office measures the cost of any first class or bulk mail piece, one of the things they check for is how accurate and easy the addresses are. If there are a bunch of bad addresses on the mailing list, or they are confusing and difficult for the USPS to locate, the cost will be much higher than a good database. Performing NCOA checks and CASS Certifications before every mailing keeps these bad addresses to a minimum.

This is how we can keep our postage rates so low. By refining addresses before the mailpiece hits the mailboxes, we save money, and we pass those costs along to you.

Mail Inkjetting rates for Blossom. This is a per-piece charge – click above for larger quantities.

Inkjetting rates include every service related to mailing that isn’t simply the cost of postage. CASS Certification, NCOA checks, inkjetting prospects’ names on their mailpieces, and everything else detailed here.

Tomorrow, we’ll post Part 2 – All other non-postcard mailers and tabbing procedures!

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