Mailing Industry Articles

 In today’s mailing market, if you want to stand out from your competition, the integrity that you can offer your customer in processing their mail is probably one of the most important investments you can make.

 With the new HIPAA Requirements and privacy and security issue requirements around more and more mail, being able to ensure the highest possible level of accuracy has become an expectation of clients. With any personal letters containing two or more pages, being able to have a means of assuring that the right page sets are collected and mailed out is not only very important but can be very costly in time, labor, materials and the penalties that all go with it.

 With advertising budgets getting tighter these days and postal rates going up, clients are demanding the utmost accuracy with their mailing lists. If the wrong inserts are pulled for the targeted prospect, it is not only money wasted but potential sales the revenue lost as well. Because of the demand for error free mailings going up and the penalties clients are requiring when errors are found, more and more mailers are looking for ways to address these issues. Not only are they looking for a failsafe means to accuracy, but they are also looking for ways to be able to verify and confirm such accuracy when clients report back errors that their customers or prospects have sited.

 Periodically hand checking mail as it is coming off the envelope stacking conveyor can no longer satisfy clients looking for a higher accuracy in their mailings. It is also time consuming to do and costly, especially when errors are found and reruns are required.
 The use of visual matching, with the use of cameras to shoot photos of inserts on a split screen monitor for the operator to monitor and confirm document matches, can improve accuracy and speed of operations.

 However, no more than one out of each five sets that go through the inserter can be viewed by the operator. But, for jobs that do not require a very high level of integrity, it can be a good solution for many letter shops and at a very low cost to add on to an existing mailing inserter.

But, with this kind of system and the human factor that it depends on, it can’t provide the zero level tolerance for errors that many clients are now insisting on. With the use of a totally automated document matching system for checking page set matches and insert station or envelope matches, through a 2D or another mark, you can now address all of the mail integrity issues that many of today’s clients now demand and so secure more of their business.

 By upgrading your current inserting systems with document matching, you can also do database lookup and print on closed faced envelopes in real time, read and confirm sequence order of your mail pieces & record data, along with time and date for backup on accuracy issues.

 On top of that, you can choose to capture and store photos of each sealed mail piece as the inserts are stuffed into the envelope.

 Although the challenges in today’s market can be very demanding, increasing the integrity of your mail capabilities by adding document matching to your current inserters, is a sure way of getting yourself out front of the competition without the costly investment of high tech systems that require hundreds of thousands of dollars in capital investment.