Software’s Critical Role in Mailing Operation

In any modern mailing operation, software is more than a critical component – it’s required to qualify for lucrative automation discounts offered by the United States Post Office.

Joann Whitcher
June 10, 2015
Satori Bulk Mailer Business Software
Satori Bulk Mailer Business Software

In any modern mailing operation, software is more than a critical component – it’s required to qualify for lucrative automation discounts offered by the United States Post Office (USPS).

Constant regulation changes from the USPS keep mailing software developers and their users on their toes to stay competitive and ahead of postage increases and fines from the USPS, noted AccuZip’s Robert Bell, Business Development & Marketing Associate.

Marketplace & Trends

Leveraging today’s intelligent mail, astute marketers are enhancing customer communications in new and transformative ways. The renewed focus on direct mail – a vital element in multi-channel marketing campaigns—makes it critical that mailers and printers take full advantage of available postal discounts, stay on top of current and near future USPS stringent regulations, and implement cost efficient practices.

As the digital world continues to change the print industry, industry pundits predicted the demise of physical mail, but in fact just the opposite has occurred, with mail now being more important than ever, remarked Scott Scheidenhelm, Senior Product Manager, Ricoh. In fact, in 2014 the USPS saw declines in First Class Mail and Standard Mail shrinking, and an overall increase in the pieces (55.6B) mailed.

Direct mail campaigns are leveraging the predictability, accountability and visibility provided by the USPS Intelligent Mail Barcode, added Chris Lien, President of BCC Software.

Successful direct mail campaigns are also dependent on quality data—which is why another big trend is leveraging complete, correct, and current name and address data (the foundation of contact data) as the basis to generate actionable information, said Lien. Customers, too, are expecting highly targeted content in their mailboxes. In fact, he says, 54% of consumers would consider ending a brand relationship that lacks tailor made content.

“Keeping mail relevant with new features and ‘sticky’ calls to action make mail both effective and valuable,” added Bell.

“As more modern infrastructures are put into place, and efficiently gather and analyze data, highly personalized and more relevant communications can be created to engage and retain customers-for life, and not just during the communication transaction,” explained Kevin Ricks, Director of Product Management for Pitney Bowes' Communication Delivery Services.

A key piece of the puzzle is automation of processes, important because it increases production efficiency, cuts down on mistakes in addressing or document delivery and produces less wasted materials (better for the environment), added Scheidenhelm.

Software Options

These various sides of the mailing process—USPS compliance, an accurate data pool, process automation—dictate software’s importance in a modern mailing operation.

To start, look for software that has the right balance between flexibility and compliance, provides all the capabilities to accommodate the various types of mailings that you will be producing, and protects you from doing things that are not allowed, said Satori Software’s Bob Schimek, Senior Director of Postal Affairs.

“The most basic requirement is to select software that carries the USPS certifications you’ll need, including CASS, MAC Batch and PAVE,” Lien said. “You’ll also want to work directly with a USPS Full-Service licensee that can provide real-time access to critical USPS data sets like NCOALink and DSF2.”

Also, the less manual intervention involved between data preparation, address cleansing (CASS, NCOAlink), data enhancement, matching, presorting, and the submitting of electronic documentation, the less likely errors and mistakes will be introduced into the process. 

As the adoption of (IMb) Full-Service, eInduction, and Seamless Acceptance continue, it is critical to have solutions on the backend to ensure the data being communicated to the USPS is complete, accurate, and reflects the actual results of the production process.    

“Your mailing software should have the capability of complying with all aspects of Full-Service (using IMb, etc.) and offer functionality that simplifies all the complexity associated with Full-Service mailings and with correctly preparing mailing and submitting the required electronic documentation, said Schimek.

When looking at industry compliance to Full-Service requirements, the USPS is reporting two areas that need improvement: Uniqueness tracking at the piece level (45-day minimum requirement) and compliance with By/For Reporting (identification of the mail owner). 

Also, the USPS has started working with software providers to create a software vendor certification process for eInduction, which will be a required component of Seamless Acceptance, explained Schimek.  Mailers continue to be moved into Seamless Parallel as their Full Service eligible mail volumes hit 75 percent. This opens new areas of the Mailers Score Card for monitoring and compliance. 

With the Mailers Scorecard, added Schimek, there’s a lot of data and information to get your arms around. “Someone in your organization has to be tasked with understanding it and watching it regularly,” he said. “Look for patterns in the errors being reported.  Are there manual steps that need to be automated, or are there software defaults settings that can be modified to prevent these errors from occurring? “    

There are two distinct sets of software solutions needed to be successful in today’s mailing world: pre-sort and post-presort, noted Jeffrey Peoples, Founder and CEO Window Book, Inc.

Pre-sort software is a suite of solutions that includes list management, address hygiene, move update, and presort software, allowing mailers to be compliant with USPS requirements for maintaining clean and current addresses, sorting the name-and-address files into a specific sequence and placed into containers to achieve postage discounts.

“Post-presort software provides its users with state-of-the-art technology in postage reduction by – amongst other things - splitting a single job into drop-ship, co-palletization and commingle components to maximize savings,” said Peoples.

“With the USPS’s move to electronic processing, post-presort software has become even more crucial to a successful mailing operation than presort software,” he added. “Particularly now with the ever-shrinking windows mailers have between running an actual presort job and doing the physical preparation and submission of the mailing to the USPS. These days mailers can simplify their lives by running very basic presort jobs (i.e., single entry point, estimated piece weights, simple DMM palletization, etc.) and then using post-presort software to work with the Mail.dat files to prepare entry-analyzed drop-ship mailings, actual piece weight and thicknesses, actual advertising percentages, the most current Labeling Lists and Destination files and more.”

Post-presort software is also critical to efficiently interact with the USPS and other members of the supply chain, he adds. It can facilitate the exchange of data to the USPS and provide feedback on the outcome of eDoc submissions. That data can also be sent to other supply chain partners to help them minimize the total costs of the mailing.

For accurate addressing, a modernized addressing solution that incorporates duplicate resolution, data normalization and data governance will improve address validation from the explosion of inbound sources of address data (such as mobile, web, kiosk), said Ricks.

“In addition to addressing solutions, incorporate composition software that interfaces with customer information management systems to create personalized and relevant communications that drive deep customer engagement, increasing response, and grow top line revenue,” he says. “Finally, management information systems should be used to collect and organize data productivity to be used for analysis to improve efficiency of production operations, enable the reporting of Quality of Service (QoS), and audit the integrity of the end-to-end production process.”

Vendor Solutions

Automate as much of the process as possible to prevent errors and mistakes from being introduced, using software such as Satori’s Bulk Mailer software, said Schimek. 

“Going beyond that, it’s having a partnership with your software provider that understands where you are looking to grow your company and providing the capabilities that will be needed,” he said. “No matter how you look at it, mailing is complicated, and will continue to get more complicated. A good software solution will streamline that complexity and also back it up with a support department that is knowledgeable and can quickly answer your questions.”

Look for software providers that can provide end-to-end solutions from enhancing your data on the front end to keep up with your customers who are constantly on the move to improving prospect data to create more targeted marketing campaigns. 

Ricoh’s Critical Communications Suite centralized workflow solution addresses the needs of communications that have to be perfect, are regulated, require tracking and reporting, are customized and contain personal information. Ricoh designed the suite to be a one-stop shop for printers for document creation and mailing, said Scheidenhelm. The suite addresses four areas that Ricoh’s customers identify as priorities: enhanced output management, tracking and compliance, workflow automation and postal optimization. For mail purposes, the last three are the most important. The suite has a web-based GUI that allows a printer to monitor and manage jobs from a single dashboard, keeping the overseeing of the tasks (both manual and automated) simple.

The Postal Optimization solution allows a mailer to identify and extract address information from his mailing jobs, even from fully composed PDFs. It also allows upfront electronic sorting of pieces so mail output would be eligible for the best possible postage discounts and helps with the correction of inaccurate address data and removal of invalid addresses, which stops unnecessary printing and eliminates wasted postage on mail that would have been returned.

A profitable mailing department starts by leveraging USPS certified software, said Lien. Maximizing profit comes from ensuring that software has real-time access to the broadest set of USPS and industry supplied data, allowing printers to expand their mailing operation to include the marketing services that will set them apart from the competition.

“BCC Software licenses more data directly from the USPS than any other software provider, and supplements that with industry supplied data sets from some of the leading providers in the business,” he said. “Our mail preparation software family, BCC Mail Manager, offers integrated real-time access to these essential data sets through as part of a powerful and seamless workflow. In short, a lot of maximizing the profitability of mailing comes from maximizing the productivity of that operation.”

Lien recommends leveraging a complete solution offered by a vendor, to include software, services and support. “Licensing, configuring, and integrating multiple disparate solutions results in what we call ‘vendor soup,’ said Lien, and can result in the printer trying to make it all work.

The Postal Service is always raising the bar on what mailers must do to receive the best discounts and comply with regulations, notes Peoples. “Post-presort software like Window Book’s DAT-MAIL is always the easiest way of altering the mailing information with production variances and making changes required by one USPS program or another,” he commented. “Post-presort products like Window Book’s EDM10X and PostalWeb can even help mailers automate the exchange of data with the Postal Service’s PostalOne! system.”

Having a built in and included feature such as scripting cansave mailers hours a day of data management – and AccuZIP6 includes this feature, says Bell. Having a hot folder scripted to auto process a file without the need for a employee to manually do this can save many hours a day that ad up over a week and a month.

“Mail tracking is underestimated and every mailer should be tracking and reporting all their mailing campaigns for their customers, helpful if there is a dispute either with the customer or the USPS,” he said. Unlimited NCOA is a very hot topic in this changing market. Make sure you ask about the NCOA feature and if EDDM is a function within the software as many print customers want EDDM (Every Door Direct Mail).”

Full-Service Intelligent Mail


The Postal Service has three key initiatives to streamline the acceptance, induction, and verification of commercial mailings: Full-Service Intelligent Mail, eInduction, and Seamless Acceptance. These key initiatives leverage existing technology to:

  • Improve mail quality by sharing information on mail preparation, identification of trends as well as trend-based quality measurements
  • Simplify the induction of mailings through automated and standardized acceptance, verification, and induction processes
  • Provide end-to-end visibility through scan data