US postal service has a direct mail sale

Faced with a big gap in its mail stream in the first quarter of 2009, the US Postal Service (USPS) is doing the natural and sensible thing: it's having a summer sale. Canadian magazine publishers who do high volumes of direct mail solicitations for subscriptions would be hard-pressed to imagine Canada Post doing something so innovative.

According to an interview in the website Target Marketing:

After a decrease of 5.2 billion pieces of mail for its first quarter of FY2009, its eighth consecutive quarter with decline in volume, and the anticipation of an equally devastating second quarter, the U.S. Postal Service recently announced its desire to offer mailers a carrot instead of a stick to get volume going. If the proposed program gets enacted, the top 4,000 U.S. mailers will be eligible for a 20 percent to 30 percent discount on their postage bills for mail volume between June 15 and Sept. 15 that exceeds the baselines established by the Postal Service.

Jerry Cerasale, a senior vice president of government affairs at the Direct Marketing Association, said in a Q & A with the website that there would be at least an indirect benefit to all mailers.

This [proposal] is an attempt by the Postal Service again to grow volume in a slow period, in a period where they believe that they have some excess capacity. If this works, our view is that it will continue.