Direct Mail - Frequently Asked Questions

Very safe, we pride ourselves in maintaining very high security standards.

Our systems meet or exceed most requirements including those of major financial and health institutions. Our data processing department has years of experience dealing with these types of issues and is very sensitive to these concerns. We will gladly work with you to address any special issues you may have in this area.

We also routinely work with our clients' staff to ensure that they are using secure methods to transfer data to our servers.
 

The primary differences between First Class mail and Standard mail are price, speed of delivery, minimum quantity and handling of undeliverable mail.

First Class presorted mail will cost you about 10 to 15 cents more per 1 ounce piece of mail than standard mail will. As the weight of your mail piece increases the price difference becomes even more pronounced.

The Post Office claims a national delivery time of 1-5 days for First Class presort mail, and 5-15 days for Standard mail. Actual times may vary, and you may have options available to speed the delivery of Standard mail, such as drop shipping it nearer to its destination.

With First Class you can mail a single piece. First Class presort requires a minimum of 500 pieces and Standard mail requires a minimum of 200 pieces.

Unendorsed First Class mail receives Forwarding and Return services equivalent to the "Forwarding Service Requested" endorsement at no charge. Unendorsed Standard mail is disposed of when it is not deliverable.
 

Our full service data center is capable of working with many formats. We will gladly work with you to convert your data files from almost any format or media imaginable.

For estimating purposes we consider the following to be Standard Data Formats:

• Excel
• Comma Separated Values
• Tab Separated Values
• Fixed Length
• xBase (dBase, Visual Fox Pro etc.)

For standard pricing, files must be properly formatted as data tables in ASCII on normal Windows compatible media. If structure information is not integrated into the data format it should be provided in a separate file. Please note that each sheet in an Excel workbook is a separate table and will be charged as such.

Short Answer... No

Long Answer: Wordmasters acts as your agent in transferring funds for you to the Post Office. Since these are not payments for our services there is no markup applied to them. When you pay with a credit card the card supplier takes a percentage of the payment, since there is no markup we have no way to recover those charges and the card suppliers will not allow us to bill you a handling charge for using a credit card.

You can however use any cash advance checks that come with your credit card to pay for postage.

For most folded self mailers we recommend preprinting your indicia on your mail piece. These pieces are obviously direct mail and gain little advantage from a stamp or meter impression.

Once in a while we come across a postcard that can benefit from a stamp, but here too, a preprinted indicia is usually the way to go.

With enveloped mail, meter impressions or stamps can increase your response rate by appearing more personal. A meter impression is good for business communications since it makes you look more established. Stamps are great when you want to communicate on a more personal level, such as in fund raising.
 

Our ink jet uses environmentally friendly water based inks and a high speed drier. So as long as your gloss stock will accept a water based ink we should be able to use it. However some gloss stocks and many coatings cannot accept water based ink, and cannot be used for ink jetting.

For a quick test try to write on the piece with a waterbased ball point pen. If after a few moments you can still easily move the ink around, we probably will not be able to ink jet on it. If the ink dries firm there is a good chance it will work. For a more definitive test send us some samples and we will test them.