Measuring the Impact of Mail Pooling and Co-Mailing on Catalog Postage Costs, Part 1 of 2

Mail pools offer more potential savings than co-binding and co-mailing; the savings are easier to estimate. Therefore it’s necessary to get a tight-cost estimate for mail-pool savings.

Co-binding and co-mailing are newer technologies being offered to catalogers, and printers are scrambling to add these programs. The difference between co-binding pools and co-mailing pools is co-binding requires two companies to combine their mail tapes and bindery runs. Because only two companies typically can co-bind, the potential postal savings are typically less than with a co-mail pool. Offline co-mail pools combine up to 30 catalogs in a weekly pool. But one drawback to offline co-mailing vs. co-binding is ink-jet information is limited to the outside back cover only.

On average, catalogers save approximately 2 cents/catalog mailed net of the co-mailing charges when co-binding or co-mailing.

Next week, in the final part of this two-part series, I’ll discuss how to compare the differences in postal costs when comparing printers.

Jim Coogan is president of Catalog Marketing Economics, a Santa Fe, N.M.-based consulting firm focused on catalog circulation planning. You can reach him at (505) 986-9902 or jcoogan@earthlink.net .