List, print, address and post - all at 221 Auburn Street
Direct Mail Services in Pittsburgh
The list, the printing, the addressing and the postal paperwork under one roof, so nobody is waiting on anybody else - and so the postage questions get asked while they can still be answered cheaply.
Making the budget go further
Let us help you avoid costly mail design mistakes
Postage is almost always the largest line on a direct mail invoice. It can easily be three times what the printing and the mailing work cost put together — which changes where the savings actually are. A few percent off the postage is worth more to the budget than any price we could quote you on the print.
And what moves the postage is not a print decision. It is two design decisions, both settled early — where the address sits, and how big the piece is — weeks before anyone sends us a file. Get them right and the same budget simply reaches more people. Get them wrong and you pay the difference on every piece, for the life of the job.
So bring us in while the piece is still a sketch. Once artwork is approved and a quarter of an inch has pushed it out of letter rates, the cheapest fix is usually to redesign it. The advice itself costs nothing — it is what makes the rest of the job worth quoting.
What goes wrong
Three things we catch, and what they cost if nobody does
These are the ones that come up again and again, in the order they get decided.
01
The address is in the wrong place
Automation rates are the cheapest postage available, and qualifying for them is largely a question of where the address sits on the piece and how much clear space surrounds it. A design that ignores that reads perfectly well and simply costs more to post, on every single piece, for the life of the job.
02
The piece is too big to be a letter
Cross the letter-size limits and the job mails at flat rates instead, which is a different and considerably more expensive class of postage. It is usually a quarter of an inch that does it, and that quarter inch is almost always free to give back at the design stage and impossible to recover afterwards.
03
The list has not been cleaned
Every undeliverable piece is paid for twice - printed, and posted - and returns nothing. Addresses go stale faster than people expect, and a list that worked last year will not be the same list this year.
We look for all three before a job goes anywhere. We will tell you if the address block needs moving, if a quarter inch off the height puts you back into letter rates, and what your list looks like once it has been through CASS and NCOA. If the answer is that the piece is fine as drawn, that is a useful thing to know too.
In house
Nothing leaves the building
The list work, the printing, the addressing and the postal paperwork all happen here. No handoffs to a letter shop, which is where schedules usually slip and where nobody can tell you whose fault it is.
The list
- CASS certification
- NCOA move updates
- De-duplication
- Merge and purge
- List scrubbing
- List management
- List purchase
The mail piece
- Ink-jet addressing
- Wafer sealing
- Inserting
- Tabbing and tipping
Into the mailstream
- Presorting
- Drop-shipping
- Postal paperwork
When we print and mail the job, the list work is included in the cost of the mailing rather than itemised at you afterwards. That is deliberate: the savings described above come from having the list, the piece and the postage in the same hands, where one decision can be weighed against another. We do take on list work by itself for established clients, quoted separately, but it is the combination that does the useful work.
Do not have a list yet? We buy and rent targeted lists too — see mailing list procurement.
The size of the work
What a mailing here usually looks like
Across every mailing we have handled since January 2023, the middle of the range is around 2,500 pieces. A quarter are under about 900, a quarter are over 9,000, and the largest was 63,000. There is no size at which this stops being worth doing properly.
One pattern in that history is worth repeating, because it is the argument on this page made by the jobs themselves: the mailings designed small enough to post at letter rates are by far the largest runs. When postage is the dominant cost, the people sending the most mail are the ones who designed for it.
Send us the piece before it is final
A rough size, a rough quantity and what you are trying to achieve is enough for us to tell you what it will cost to post and whether a small change would cost you less. That conversation is free, and it is worth having before the artwork is signed off rather than after.
Vision for Print, Mail & Fulfillment in Pittsburgh
From Concept To Mailbox, We Do It All. Let Broudy Be Your Partner.
or call 412.362.6700