Tag: North America

Industry Document Trends – Transactional Mail

Posted by | Jul 11, 2007 | |

Dear Paul,

TransPromo documents are gaining momentum and something every company should be looking at as a vehicle to more effectively communicate with your customers.

As an association and a provider of educational forums this is the number one topic requested by our members and industry professionals to include in our programming.

The reasons are evident if you look at the results of recent surveys conducted by InfoTrends:

Consumers when asked if they have a preference for receiving traditional statements or personalized statements that contain some relevant and/or useful information to the recipients, the majority (63%) voted for the TransPromo document.
36% of survey respondents indicated that they are already combining marketing messages with their transaction data and presenting the two in one printed document, and another 33% stated that they plan to do so within the next 5 years.
Of 212 document owners who were responsible for the purchase and/or development of direct mail programs.
27% indicated that they are currently including transactional information in their direct mail documents
and an additional 24% plan to do so by 2010.

As an educational sponsor of the upcoming InfoTrends Transpromo Summit, being held in New York August 22 – 23 rd Xplor members are eligible for special member discounts.

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Package-laden FedEx truck burns

Posted by | Jul 11, 2007 | |

Hundreds of packages shipped via FedEx were damaged in a truck fire on the Gulf Freeway near Reveille early Wednesday morning.

Whether any customers lost irreplaceable items was unknown, but FedEx’s package-tracking system allows the company to notify every shipper of the incident, said David Westrick, a spokesman for the ground transportation division of FedEx. That process began Wednesday morning, he said.

The trailer burned about 2:30 a.m. when traveling from a Dallas FedEx ground hub to Houston, Westrick said. How many of the 800 packages on board were damaged or destroyed was unknown Wednesday, Westrick said.

FedEx plans to expedite loss claims related to the fire, Westrick said. The cause of the fire is being investigated.

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Senator McHugh bill would stop mail-order cigarettes at USPS

Posted by | Jul 11, 2007 | |

Rep. John McHugh has again introduced legislation that would outlaw the mailing of tobacco products through the US Postal Service.

If passed, the bill, H.R. 2932, would amend Title 39 of the United States Code, restricting the USPS from delivering certain tobacco products. The bill provides that cigarettes, smokeless tobacco and roll-your-own-tobacco are nonmailable matter, would not be carried or delivered by mail and would be disposed of as the Postal Service directs. It also imposes a penalty of USD 100,000 for each violation.

All three major shipping companies — DHL, FedEx and UPS — have stopped shipping cigarettes nationwide and, as a result, all Internet tobacco vendors are using the USPS to make their deliveries. In addition, in January 2006, Philip Morris USA reached an agreement with a coalition of 37 attorneys general aimed at combating the sale of the company’s cigarettes over the Internet and through the mail. And, in March 2005, the attorneys general also announced that the major credit card companies had all agreed to stop processing credit card payments for the Internet retailers.

Matt Lavoie, press secretary to McHugh, said that McHugh had planned to attach the bill to postal reform legislation that was passed last year during conference negotiations but was unable to because a conference never took place. As a result, the bill never passed.

Other senators have introduced similar bills over the years, but they also never passed.

The USPS has said it has continued to ship cigarettes because, under postal law, packages are sealed against inspection unless there is probable cause.

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DHL launches new service in south Texas

Posted by | Jul 11, 2007 | |

DHL announced it has introduced a new service in Harlingen, Texas, capable of handling triple the volume of its previous offering as well as heavier palletized freight and non-conveyable material to meet the growing needs of customers shipping into and out of the Rio Grande Valley and Northern Mexico regions.

Located at the southern tip of Texas, Harlingen is a crossroads of international commerce, offering the most efficient route to the Mexican border cities of Matamoros and Reynosa as well as the industrial city of Monterrey, via the Free Trade Bridge. The Free Trade Bridge is one of the largest and most modern ports of entry in South Texas with a full U.S. customs inspection facility that can accommodate up to 75 trucks simultaneously. DHL’s new Harlingen service will directly benefit the surrounding region’s major “maquiladora” industries, including electronics, automotive parts and medical devices.

The Harlingen service upgrade comes less than a month after DHL announced the opening of its Hermosillo, Mexico, gateway to meet the increasing demand from customers shipping across the U.S.-Mexico border from Northwest Mexico. These investments are part of DHL’s North America Trade Lane initiative, which was launched in November 2006 to increase the speed and efficiency of cross-border shipments across North America.

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Installation of new automated postal machines delayed

Posted by | Jul 11, 2007 | |

The Postal Service is delaying the second stage of installing automated postal centers in lobbies.

Spokesman Gerry McKiernan confirmed the delay Wednesday, saying the agency is studying why some of its already installed automated centers did not perform up to expectations.

About 2,500 automated postal centers have been located in post offices across the country. The centers allow customers to weigh letters and parcels, select the type of service needed and print out postage, using credit cards to pay.

A June report from the agency’s inspector general said that as many as half of the installed centers were not meeting minimum expectations.

McKiernan said of the 2,500 installed, 514 centers were not meeting expectations for various reasons.

As a result, he said, deployment of further centers is being delayed while the problem ones are being assessed. The agency also cited cost considerations in the delay.

McKiernan said that 145 of the underperforming centers are being relocated to other offices. In the other cases, officials are trying to determine if customers just don’t want to use the machines or need assistance getting started with them.

In some cases lobby directors are being put into service to help people begin using the automated centers.

An inspector general’s report had warned that installing the planned 3,000 phase two centers could end up causing a loss of USD 115 million over seven years, rather than the anticipated USD 243 million in income.

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