What You Need to Know About the USPS Price Increase

The annual USPS price increase may be inevitable, but its impact on your bottom line doesn’t have to be.

After all, we’ve all been down this road before.

There are measures you can take to find savings and reduce costs on your postage. And if you make them part of your strategy for the coming months, they will also help put you on a more profitable long-term path.

Know Your Numbers

Let’s break down those USPS price changes:

• The average postage price increase will be 1.46% when new rates take effect on January 24, 2021. First Class mail is going up by 1.831%, and USPS Marketing Mail by 1.509%
• Under First Class, Presorted Letters and Postcards are increasing by 2.163%, while rates for Flats are being raised by only 1.260%
• Under USPS Marketing Mail, High Density and Saturation Letters are going up by 2.373%, while High Density and Saturation Flats by only 0.989%.

Basically, prices will be lower for bulk mailings that presort to a finer degree or dropship mailpieces deeper into the Postal Service’s network. If a campaign is more costly for USPS to process, it will pay more. So High Density and Saturation Flats and Letters will receive lower than average rate increases, or even none at all. Consider how you can presort your mail better to avoid paying much more.

All of the final USPS price changes can be found on USPS Postal Explorer.

Work On Your Data

Data, a wise person once said, is the lifeblood of your direct marketing.

To keep your costs under control, go back to your data. There are likely to be efficiencies found with a new focus on this factor.

For example, segmentation deserves a fresh look as a way to both find savings and to develop new opportunities for growth.

Prioritize what customers get more of your attention with mail based on the RFM model. Your best customers have bought the most recently, buy most frequently, and spent the most money.

Other segmentations include demographics like age, gender, income level, and more.

Our direct mail data guide provides insight on all of the ways to make your data work better for you.

Use Promotion Discounts

Mail is transforming into a channel that plays well with others in ways that make sense. One good way to keep your mail relevant and vibrant is to take advantage of USPS’s promotion discounts.

This is an entire program that gives mailers a 2% discount on the USPS price for a campaign incorporating new and emerging marketing and printing technologies in mail. In 2021, the promotions will be:

• Tactile, Sensory and Interactive Engagement
• Emerging and Advanced Technology
• Personalized Color Transpromo
• Mobile Shopping
• Earned Value Reply Mail
• Informed Delivery

You’ll learn more about all of these promotional opportunities in a future post, so watch this space.

Wrapping it up

We know that all of these USPS price changes can be complicated as well as frustrating.

Fortunately, at mailing.com, our expertise and our partnership with USPS can help you figure it all out. And we drop ship to all United States BMUs, SCFs and DDUs.

Our postal experts and data management team can help you put together a complete and cost-effective direct mail campaign – from planning to printing to mailing – to accomplish your goals quickly.

Drop us a line or call us! We’d love to show you how to put mail to work in your next campaign during the year ahead.

To address the most recent postage increases, please check out our post with updated strategies and tips from April 2024.