Jamaican PostCorp goes for profit with new deliveries
The Postal Corporation of Jamaica (PostCorp), in a drive for profitability, is to offer occasional mail delivery primarily to business clients, and in the process, strengthen a market segment that is still in its infancy.
With this new service, the PostCorp believes it can enable corporate Jamaica to reach targeted audiences efficiently by distributing their brochures and fliers.
“The advertising mail market is not really well developed in Jamaica,” says Dr Blossom O’Meally Nelson, postmaster general and chief executive officer of PostCorp. “People tend to spend a lot of money on radio and television advertising (and) in the print media, but that direct advertising to households and individuals is best facilitated by the post office.”
O’Meally Nelson told JIS News – the government’s news agency – that the PostCorp had recognised the business opportunity for advertising mail service and would move quickly to satisfy it.
The introduction of the new service comes months after the PostCorp sent out a warning to private courier companies that they were violating the PostCorp’s exclusive right to deliver mails in Jamaica. The PostCorp said it would put in place a system of granting these companies licence for a fee.
In her interview with JIS, O’Meally Nelson disclosed that the new service would be offered in two approaches. One, she said, would be geographical mailing, which would allow businesses to market their service to persons in specific locations. The other would be direct mailing, where the fliers or brochures would be addressed to specific individuals.
Geographic mailing, she explained, was useful to small or new businesses that were just getting off the ground and wished to reach their clientele in a certain area.
“If, for example, most of the persons you are targeting live in the Portmore area, then you can send out fliers and brochures through the post office and we will get it to the individual addresses,” she explained. The mail would be addressed to “the occupants” and placed in letterboxes.
O’Meally Nelson said the Postal Corporation was ready and equipped to provide the geographical service, but was not yet prepared to offer direct mailing. According to her, the PostCorp was currently developing various mailing lists before providing the service.
These lists would include persons in various professions or groups, including doctors, lawyers or other professional groups and associations. The postmaster general added that if a client had a ready mailing list of his/her target group, then direct mailing would be accommodated.
The cost of both geographic and direct mailing was subject to the volume of items being delivered, although geographic mailing would be offered at a lower rate, Dr O’Meally Nelson said.
The PostCorp, which has been losing money, has over the past few years been attempting to transform itself into a modern, technology-driven, multifaceted information and product-delivery company. It has also been seeking to reclaim market share lost to private companies, during the time when the PostCorp went into a steep decline primarily because of technological developments, and the postal service reputation as lacking reliability of service.
