If your small company has 15 cents, the United States Postal Service wants your business.
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Postal worker
On Tuesday, the USPS launched a new marketing campaign to promote“Every Door Direct Mail,”a shipping service for small businesses with postage rates starting at 14.5 cents.
“Every Door Direct Mail is designed for small businesses,” said Paul Vogel, the agency’s president and chief marketing and sales officer. “For less than 15 cents a piece, our customers can send fliers, menus, brochures and advertisements in highly targeted ways. The Web tool is free and easy to use, enabling restaurants, doctors’ offices and other small businesses to map their coverage areas online, so they can really zero in on the streets and neighborhoods they want to reach.”
Businesses can target areas by neighborhood, city or ZIP code and do not need the names or addresses for individual households.
Since the program’s launch in April 2011 through December, it has generated $153 million in revenue for the Postal Service, which continues to lose billions of dollars each year.
In February, theagency announced plansto close or consolidate 223 mail processing centers and eliminate up to 35,000 jobs to cut costs.
Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe has said it needs to slash $20 billion in annual costs by 2015.
While the Internet and email have caused the U.S. Postal Service's business to plunge, the agency hopes to capitalize on technology by making Every Door Direct Mail a Web-based service.
“We want small businesses to make the U.S. Postal Service their shipper of choice,” Vogel said. “We are doing that by developing smart tools and product offerings that help businesses grow — both theirs and ours.”’
The agency also announced new tools to help small businesses ship their products, such as a redesign and re-launch of Click-N-Ship, which enables users to ship packages online in four steps. Half of the program’s one-million-plus registered users are small businesses.
By mid-April, another program, Click-N-Ship for Business will launch, the agency said. The program is designed for small- and medium-size businesses that have 10 to 100 pieces of mail to ship per day. It includes expanded payment options, including for international services, and a downloadable desktop application.
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