Mailing experts and creative teams such as advertising agencies, graphic designers and public relations firms need to sit down at the same table to consult. And the sooner the better. With a mailer at the table, the design team would have the benefit of the mailers expertise. They would know if the paper was the correct weight to meet USPS specifications, they would know if the size meets the aspect ratios, and if the addressing area is large enough for the mailer to apply barcodes for the lowest postage possible.
One of the most common problems with post cards that have already been printed that come into our shop to be mailed is the vertical line that designers like to have to separate the copy from the addressing area. That might have been good in 1970 when you were sending a card from Florida, saying “I wish you were here”, but not in today’s postal world. The line confuses the OCR scanners at the USPS because it looks like a line in the bar-code, so it may prevent the customer from getting the lowest postage because of the line. Just leave that vertical line off.
At Burns Mailing & Printing, Inc., we have free digital templates to show our creative teams how much area that they can use for copy on the addressing side of the post card or mailer and the space that they must leave for the addressing area. We will check the file for postal specifications before it is printed to avoid costly mistakes. Of course, if we are designing the mailer, our graphic designers are well versed in USPS postal regulations and our customers don’t have to worry about postal regulations. They can just leave the driving to us!
Good facts and thanks for sharing. I have seen a lot of time and expense incurred for this “failure to communicate”.
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