Royal Mail launched a new initiative yesterday offering a 15 percent discount on custom-published magazine mailing costs.
The promotion is designed to encourage clients with a prospective customer title to consider mail as a distribution method, encourage new clients to test mailed customer magazines as a marketing tool and encourage those with existing pick-up titles to test mail as an alternative.
To qualify, clients must sign up before Dec. 31 and commit to at least two mail drops before Aug. 21, 2006. If distributed before Dec. 31, the mailing will qualify for an additional 2 percent discount.
The promotion comes amid increasing bitterness between postal authorities and the PPA after confirmation earlier this month that size-based pricing would be introduced next summer. Under the pricing initiative, postage will be charged according to the size of a letter or package as well as its weight.
The changes would let Royal Mail charge more for lighter but larger mail, but some heavier items — catalogs and books, for example — would cost less.
The Periodical Publishers Association lobbied to get the proposal abandoned, saying that the category could see increases of up to 125 percent and that it would effectively wipe out weekly tabloid magazines as a genre.
Almost two-thirds of magazines are currently mailed to recipients, and industry research shows that 79 percent of consumers prefer to receive magazines by mail.
Melissa Campanelli covers postal news, CRM and database marketing for DM News and DMNews.com. To keep up with the latest developments in these areas, subscribe to our daily and weekly e-mail newsletters by visiting www.dmnews.com/newsletters
