If your company has a higher than usual print volume then you might want to think about adding a postage meter printer from Pitney Bowes to your office, if you have not done so already. Postage meters save your employees a great deal of money (up to 20% on your postage expenses by eliminating guess work*), time and stress when it comes to organizing outgoing mailings. These mailing stations have built in scales and are capable of weighting small packages or envelopes up to ten pounds (varies with model).  The Pitney Bowes postage meters also support a wide variety of mail types from parcel post and first class mail up to international mailings. Your postage meter will also automatically retrieve the current market postal rates since it is connected to the web. Plus replacing your Pitney Bowes supplies and ink cartridges is fairly cheap! Pitney Bowes currently offers three postage meter digital mailing stations to fulfill the needs of your business; the DM 100, DM 200 and MailStation 2. The first step to choosing which Pitney Bowes Postage Meter is right for you is to evaluate your small business needs. Consider your average monthly postage spend.

If your business has a small volume of postage spend, then the postage meter you should consider is the MailStation 2. This digital mailing system is an all-purpose meter that is perfect for a company that spends between $50 and $100 on mailings per month. This particular unit is capable of weighting packages up to five pounds. You will also be able to manage your costs by tracking one account, with the option to expand to five or ten. By purchasing a MailStation 2 you will be limited to manually loading the envelopes by hand, although the unit does print at a rate of eighteen letters per minute. Replacing your MailStation 2 postage meter (P797) ink cartridge will be required approximately every 880 prints, so keep that in mind! If you are looking for a greater degree of automation or a postage meter that handles a larger volume then consider the next step up with the DM 100.

The Pitney Bowes DM 100 is the intermediate level postage meter. The DM100 is able to handle a higher amount of mailing volume ($100 to $150 per month) and supports up to 10 pound packages on its scale. Other perks of upgrading to the DM 100 postage meter are that your Letters per Minute (LPM) nearly doubles to a rate of 30 LPM and now you don’t need to worry about hand feeding the postage meter as it is semi-automatic.  If you choose to purchase the DM 100, the need to replace your Pitney Bowes postage meter supplies won’t be as frequent as the 793-M ink cartridge has a higher page yield at approximately 3,000 impressions. That last noteworthy difference between the DM 100 and MailStation 2 postage meters is that with the DM 100 you have the option of adding a sealer / moistener. Now if you are looking for the ultimate Pitney Bowes postage meter, look no further than the DM 200 Postage Meter.

The major differences between the DM 100 and the DM 200 lie in the postage meter’s capabilities. The DM 200 is able to handle twice the amount of mail volume as it’s predecessor at a volume of $150 – $300 per month. The LPM is capable of printing at 40 LPM, a 33% increase over the DM 100 model. Another benefit of the DM 200 is that you will be able to track up to 25 accounts (expandable to 50)! Pitney Bowes 765-0 ink cartridges are used in the DM 200 postage meter and they yield the same count of  impressions as the DM 100 (3,000 yield). The one and only drawback to the DM 200 postage meter is that the scale can only handle packages that weigh up to five pounds. So I guess the only question remaining is which Pitney Bowes postage meter is right for you?

*Reference:  PB.com

Did you know that the US Postal service returns 5 billion pieces of undeliverable mail each year? This cost the US postal service more than $1.8 billion dollars in 2004…

Pitney Bowes printer supplies company is leading the coalition of environmentally friendly manufacturers in the printer industry.  They are striving to become a more responsible printer supplies company and reducing their impact on the environment by improving the sustainability of the Pitney Bowes printer supplies, monitoring how the company operates and revolutionizing the printer manufacturer industry as a whole with ground breaking innovations.

Pitney Bowes is dedicated to reducing the environmental impact of our operations, products and services. – Pitney Bowes

Pitney Bowes’ Printer Supplies Green Design

Back in 1991 when their competitors were thinking about reducing costs and increasing the bottom lines, Pitney Bowes was thinking about improving the world. That is why they created the Design for Environmental Quality (DfEQ) program. The goal with the program was to minimize environmental impact at an early stage of product development and throughout the printer supplies’ life cycle starting with the material input, moving into manufacturing and ending in recycling. As a result many Pitney Bowes printer supplies are labeled as Energy-star efficient, and their products on average consume 10 to 14% less energy per life cycle than their product predecessor.

On top of their “lean green” manufacturing techniques, 95% of Pitney Bowes printer supplies are recyclable.  They make a conscious effort to recover Pitney Bowes pritner supplies which can be demonstrated in the fact that in 2008, Pitney Bowes processed nearly 8 million pounds of cooper, steel, paper and other materials through Pitney Bowes printer supplies return programs.  Lastly, Pitney Bowes developed the ecowise℠ service to help consumers identify their carbon footprint and provide find ways to reduce it!

Pitney Bowes “Lean Green” Operations

The printer supplies manufacturer is constantly on the hunt for new, innovative ways in which they can reduce their carbon footprint. In 2007, Pitney Bowes Norway began replacing their leased vehicles with ones with lower emissions. They gave employees three options: electric, hydrogen or bio-fuel.  This move resulted in 40% lower emissions.  Pitney Bowes has also established an “energy task force” to bring employee awareness about energy conservation. In 2008, Pitney Bowes was able to reduce their electricity consumption by 3 million kilowatt hours, saving $873,000 and reducing carbon footprint by 2.6K metric tons of carbon oxide. Pitney Bowes has also made energy efficiency improvements to their offices by improving heating, ventilation & A/C units as well as purchasing energy-star approved computer monitors and installing motion sensors to control lighting systems. An article on Office-Suites.com reports that Pitney Bowes is joining other large corporations such as IBM and DuPont by encouraging commercial landlords to offer competitive rates for “green office” units. The site also reports Pitney Bowes leases 362 offices in the United States alone (totaling 2.8 million sq. ft).

The last two initiatives Pitney Bowes printer supplies manufacturer has employed include; their waste management / recycling program and sustainable forest projects.  Pitney Bowes has been volunteering in the EPA’s WasteWise program, designed to reduce corporate waste, since 1996. In 2008, Pitney Bowes was named to the WasteWise Hall of Fame for their continued commitment (In 2008 alone their program diverted 7.52 thousand tons of waste from land fills) to the program. Back in 2003 Pitney Bowes entered into a partnership with the EPA and began purchasing renewable energy credits to support green power projects (solar, wind & biomass). It is also worthy to note that Pitney Bowes has a paper procurement and sustainability team that monitors the company’s paper consumption both internally and externally to decrease overall waste.

Environmental Impacts To Date?

We will let the graph below speak for itself in terms of the “hard numbers”. Bottom line, Pitney Bowes is a leader within the printer industry in terms of going green and becoming a sustainable, forward-thinking company.  Other companies, not just those in the printing business or in manufacturing for that matter should model their ethics and behavior after Pitney Bowes, who have proven time again that a company can improve the bottom-line without negatively impacting the environment. The world is a better place with Pitney Bowes.

To learn more about Pitney Bowes’ corporate responsibility visit their website which includes white papers, studies and other reports pertaining to green operations.

For any of you marketers out there who use direct mail marketing as a part of your marketing strategy, you know how “dirty” your mailing lists can get after time. Bad or invalid mailing addresses can have a negative impact on your direct mail campaign performance and can alter your return on investment. Why not just remove those bad addresses? Based on the size of your mailing list, it takes a tremendous amount of time and patience to identify the problem addresses and then try to fix them by either removing them completely from your database or by contacting the customer / client and requesting updated information.

For most small to medium size businesses, mailing list cleansing tools may seem overpriced and out of reach due to smaller mailing lists. That is until now! The wonderful folks over at Pitney Bowes have released what they call “AddressRightNow“, a service where the user can upload their mailing list to Pitney’s website, and within minutes you can identify invalid addresses from your list and either download those entries or have them removed from your list. The other service offered will alert you if any of the people in your list have moved to another location and will even provide you with that new and updated address.

The new Pitney Bowes AddressRightNow service will also help you get your addresses compliant with the USPS standards for updating mailing lists. Starting on January 10th, 2010, if you do not adhere to these standards you may be subject to an addtional 7 cents per mailer that does not meet these requirements.

Now the good part. How much does this service cost? Well, it is relatively affordable considering the 3 levels of service you are getting and the savings you will see from cutting out the bad addresses from your lists. Address verification services start at $40 for up to 1,000 addresses, and the move update services begin at $60 for up to 1,000 addresses. While there are no requirements for how big or small your list has to be, there do appear to be certain price breaks if you have a larger list or if you send mailers more frequently. For more information on the pricing, check out the three plans available on the Pitney Bowes website. Those plans are the “One Time Payment” plan, the “Basic Subscription” plan, and the “Enhanced Subscription” plan.

While these mail list cleansing services may seem unnecessary for some direct mail programs, the potential cost savings and delivery rate increases seem like enough reason to give one a shot and see what kind of effect it has on your campaign.