[Stonehenge]

We're getting close to sending out our first mailer, and I'm looking into rates. Wanted to find out if anyone is getting a discount by using the delivery point barcode on their labels.

If so, can it even fit onto the standard address label?

Also, were you able to get the barcode as part of your mailing list (if you bought it from a mailing list company)?

If not, I'm wondering if there is a software package out there someone has used to make use of this barcoding.

[pineapple]

I have not used the barcode in my mailings.

MS Word will automatically generate them when you are printing labels.

[Stonehenge]

I discovered some information today that I was not aware of about a week ago...

Either the USPS rep didn't have their info straight, or I got it wrong as I wrote, but I had been under the impression that there would be things we could do to reduce the postage needed on a mailing, with one of those things being bar codes and putting the postcards into a certain kind of order (just by zip, I believe).

But as it turns out, (for a postcard,) the only way you can get down to the $.18-.21 per piece postage is to have a bulk mail permit, and to have your list CASS certified (whatever that is) every few months. Well, for us to break even (vs. just sticking a $0.24 stamp on the cards), we'd need to send at least 18,000+ postcards. I'm not certain that there are 18,000 households in our market with the demos we want.

And that's just to break even, and does not include the cost to get the list CASS certified (and I have no idea how much that costs).

So we're going with just a $0.24 stamp on every postcard - it gives us some extra features over standard mail, so we'll see how it goes. In total, we'll end up spending about $0.32 apiece for our mailing.

So to make a short story long, the bar codes don't do anything to help you (unless you have a certified list, permits, etc), so there's no reason to use them.

But I didn't know that until about an hour or so ago.