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A Careful Decision

Both mailing and fulfillment can raise a printer's sales volume, but need to be fully analyzed before plunging into one area or the other.

"Fulfillment can be a lucrative service to offer," noted Bennett. "Say you print a campaign for a customer and you insert a reply card into the campaign. For those who reply, they get a tea pot or some other premium gift. You tell your customer that you'll handle those services for them. So you expand your warehouse to hold the premiums. You hire part-time workers and charge the customer to do Pick 'N Pak. You tie the account into your UPS or FedEx account."

However, noted Quinn, unlike mailing services, fulfillment requires the need to control inventory, which he says is no easy task.

Bennett cautioned that mailing does not provide as high an ROI as fulfillment, but it is easier to get into. "Mailing equipment is well-made and will last a very long time," she said. "It's easy to buy used equipment to enter into the market. But you may want to buy new cameras, inkjet heads, and software to take advantage of current technologies. However if you mess up a mailing job for a customer, you may have to re-print it, pay for the postage again, and perhaps be charged postage penalties, all with an unhappy customer because you missed their mark in distributing their mail. To avoid this financial risk, printers can purchase an errors and omission insurance policy."

A Few Products To Consider

For printers who are interested in adding mailing and/or fulfillment, here are a few resources to look into.

This past fall, Bowe Bell + Howell introduced NetSort, a new sorting software platform that supports full-service use of the new postal service's Intelligent Mail barcode (IMB). NetSort allows mailers to take advantage of discounts that will be available through full-service use of the IMB. The firm also launched a redesigned version of its JETVision Platinum system for letters, flats and 6x9-inch mail pieces produced on new, legacy and third-party equipment.

JETVision Platinum offers top and bottom reading capabilities, and handles both portrait and landscape mail piece orientations ranging from one page to three-quarters of an inch thick. This flexibility provides mailers with a single solution for handling multiple jobs, applications and systems, and minimizes setup and downtime as well as the number of technologies needed to ensure corporate, postal and regulatory standards are met.

And Buhrs Americas recently introduced its BB700 Pocket Envelope Inserting System, a new, higher speed version rated at 16,000 pieces per hour—a 2,000 piece-per-hour increase over what was already the fastest multiformat inserter on the market. The distinguishing feature of the BB700 is its format flexibility; it operates at rated speed over the widest range of envelope sizes in the industry.

Debora Toth is a freelance writer who has been writing about the graphic arts industry for 25 years. She also is a public relations specialist and operates Coastline Public Relations. She can be reached at coastlinepr@aol.com.

Upcoming M&F Shows

• The Mailing and Fulfillment Service Association will be holding its annual conference and exposition from June 3-6 in Chicago. For further information, contact Mailing & Fulfillment Service Association, 1421 Prince St., Suite 410, Alexandria, Va. 22314, (703) 836-9200, www.MFSAnet.org.
• The Bennett Group will be offering several seminars at the On Demand Show from March 30-April 2 in Philadelphia. These include "Printers Expanding Into the Mailing Industry: 10 Steps to Success" on Tuesday, March 31 • 11-11:50AM, presented by Mary Ann Bennett, president and CEO, The Bennett Group, Inc.; "Increase Print Revenues by Maximizing Postage Savings with Mailpiece Design" on Tuesday, March 31 • 3:30-4:20 p.m. presented by Mary Ann Bennett.; and "Implementing the Intelligent Mail Barcode and Software Panel Discussion" on Wednesday, April 1 • 10:10-11:00 a.m. presented by Mark Higgins, vice president of marketing and data services, BCC Software, and Mary Ann Bennett.