Business reply fees hiked 9%

For those publishers who are reeling from the distance-related pricing coming in January from Canada Post, you may or may not have noticed that business reply mail rates are going up by 9% at the same time. If you rely on postage-paid reply envelopes to increase response in your direct mail, brace yourself to pay 72 cents for every one that is delivered to you starting January 12, 2009. This year it was 66 cents. Within quite recent memory it was 56 cents. More reasons, if you are doing direct mailings, to make it easy for subscribers to reply online.

We guess it's a good thing that they don't charge BRM fees based on how far away the responding customer mails from. [Don't give them any ideas -- ed.]