Tim Cronin

At the beginning of this year, the U.S. Postal Service increased “Standard A” bulk mailing rates up to 11 percent. Few catalog marketing companies were in a position to simply absorb the extra postage. The challenge facing them was how to mitigate such a significant cost increase. Fortunately, there are ways to optimize production costs and offset much of the cost of the postal rate hike. The Three “P’s” The three major cost components in producing a mail order catalog are postage, paper and printing. “Postage is basically a fixed cost, but paper and printing can yield significant cost efficiencies,” notes Andrew Hanscom