If your business sends out letters, fliers, postcards, certified mail or newsletters overseas, the U.S. Postal Service says it has a way to do it faster and more inexpensively.
It’s called NetPost Mailing Online, offered through the Postal Service Web site, www.usps.gov. It has been available for domestic mail since 2000, and it’s now available for international mail as well, said Lee Garvey, president of PosteDigital, which runs the service under license.
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“There was a recognized need for something to make mailing easier for small and medium-sized businesses,” Garvey said, and NetPost looks to do that: It makes sending one to 1 million pieces of mail as easy as uploading a Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat document containing letters, fliers, postcards, newsletters, etc., along with a mailing list.
NetPost handles the rest of the job – prints the electronic documents, folds them, stuffs envelopes and applies postage and bar codes.
“I can do 500- to 1,000-piece mailings in five minutes,” said Robert Fellows, president of Surfside Software, in East Orleans, Mass., on Cape Cod.
Fellows said his company, which publishes software for school administrations, has been using NetPost to send postcards to prospective customers for the past three months. Previously, Surfside had printed and sent out its own mailings.
The greatest benefit is “the ability to get a mailing out very quickly without the labor on our part,” Fellows said. “It is usually mailed the next business day.” The reasonable prices and high quality of NetPost printing, he added, also helped spur the decision to switch.
A price chart on the Web site shows a 41/4-by-6, two-sided postcard with spot color can be printed and mailed to U.S. addresses, first class, for 34.4 cents apiece, for example. Nonprofits would pay 28.8 cents apiece; to airmail items to international addresses would cost 87.5 cents apiece.
A four-page, full-color folded “self-mailer” booklet, on the other hand, would cost $2.10 for first-class U.S. delivery, $1.92 for nonprofits, and $2.51 for international airmail.
The Postal Service started offering NetPost for international mailings because “we’re becoming a more global community,” said program manager Michael Tropp. About 35,000 individuals and businesses use the service, he said. Asked why not more, Tropp said the Postal Service needs to promote so many products and services that sometimes there are not enough advertising dollars to go around.
Garvey said many customers have asked that the service be expanded so they could send mail to customers abroad.
“It works exactly the same as the domestic [service],” Tropp said. “It’s just as simple as sending something domestically.”
NetPost allows businesses to choose the class of mail, type of printing (color or black and white) and the size they want by the click of a mouse. The online mailing service gives businesses a discounted rate on postage regardless of the number of pieces mailed, Tropp said. For example, the postage for one NetPost postcard is 20.4 cents, as opposed to the regular 24 cents.
Mailing online also eliminates the need for businesses to standardize addresses by checking the customer’s address information against the Postal Service database, Garvey said. If a NetPost customer’s address doesn’t match the one in the database, NetPost sends a notice to the customer to be double-checked.
“We’re doing the hard work, the heavy lifting for the small business mailer,” Garvey said.
Tropp said NetPost saves business owners from applying for permits to send bulk mail. And it saves time for postal workers having to explain the detailed bulk mail rules and regulations.
NetPost also saves the Postal Service on handling costs because it automatically sorts, applies bar codes and standardizes addresses, resulting in less handling by postal workers, Tropp said.
It also saves on transportation costs because NetPost has three printing sites, which allow mail to be sent electronically to the area of the country it’s going before it’s printed, thus reducing shipping costs.
“It actually saves us a lot,” Tropp said.
