Presorting Business Transforms Itself into Digital Service Provider

By Jack Lazard, Director of Operations

ZIPDIRECT

ZIPDIRECT began life in San Diego as a presorting business, helping clients reap postal savings and expedite mail delivery. Today, we are the San Diego Post Office’s single largest customer. Our 350 employees process about 2.5 million mail pieces daily in our San Diego headquarters and Sacramento, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Los Angeles locations.

These days, however, we produce many of the documents we mail, with expanded service offerings that include data processing, creative design, printing, folding and inserting. Presorting now represents just half of our business. Direct mail accounts for another 30 percent, and producing account statements, invoices and other documents, the other 20 percent. For many customers, we deliver turnkey solutions. And we love tough printing assignments, because they showcase our ability to harness technology and hard-won experience to produce materials that work for clients.

The approach is working: our business has quadrupled in size in a six-month period.

State-of-the-art information technology supports these services, including an IBM mainframe at our San Diego data hub and a high-speed PC network for desktop publishing. All five locations have Xerox devices for black-and-white printing, including the 180 page-per-minute (ppm) Xerox DocuPrint 180 and 135-ppm DocuPrint 4635 and DocuPrint 4135 Laser Printing Systems. Highlight color is done with two 50-ppm Xerox DocuPrint 4850 Highlight Color Laser Printing Systems and one 92-ppm DocuPrint 4890. A Solimar server provides data conversion and routing for the printers; Bell & Howell MailStar finishing systems complete our workflow.

Our greatest strength lies in advising our customers on the best ways to apply our advanced capabilities to achieve their performance goals. For example, we advised one company to change its invoices to print the amount due in color. That sole change cut average bill payment turnaround roughly in half, from 65 days to 35.

Often we recommend personalization to enhance a document’s value. To help a campaigner influence voters on a sales tax referendum, we customized a flyer for 70 sections of the county. Each flyer showed voters specifically where the nearest new library would be in relation to their homes if the library funding passed. Using the high-speed DocuPrint 180 for the customized printing, we produced one million flyers in just two weeks.

We routinely produce even more specialized mailers. To help a client illustrate how its service can reduce property taxes, we recently used the DocuPrint 4890 to highlight—in color—the sum each homeowner could expect to save. Color and personalization helped boost the response rate to eight percent, four times the two percent return that is normal for direct mail.

Now we are designing a custom-bound print package for a national consumer services company to include books, charts, graphs, letters and other customer-specific elements. We are offering 24-hour turnaround on orders, even though TV ad response could require 200,000 images to be printed daily. The DocuPrint 180 will help us handle the volume.

This type of synergy—combining data management, direct mail and digital printing knowledge to cut costs and provide a competitive advantage—is what today’s leading mail service specialists bring to the table.