"The only sure bait when you angle for praise".

That's Lord Chesterfield's definition of modesty, and a newsletter publisher recently proved him correct when he turned down being a subject of Publisher Profile.

Fred Goss and I exchanged compliments about the publisher after he told Fred that, although he has high regard for NL/NL, he doesn't do personal publicity, has never issued a press release, and has never done a newspaper story argued that if presorting delays lost you one customer, the cost savings from presorting were lost.

But the presorting business generally is reliable and allows newsletter publishers to shop around for a reliable, well-run presort house. Most reputable presort houses nowadays offer same-day turnaround, if they can pick up your mail by a certain time. A good presort house should be able to deliver your mail to the post office before midnight if it picks it up by 4 p.m. If such a deadline can be met, your mail should see no delay from your normal delivery to the post office.

Sharing the savings and working the math

Most presort houses work on the basis of sharing your savings, usually 50-50, although each presorter is different. Since reclassification, few, if any, will do the work for the simple, non-automated presort rate. They use spray-on barcoding for your mail so they can get at least the basic automation presort rate. That 27.8[cts.], so you share the 6.2[cts.] per piece. But if the presort house can get your mail down to a 3-digit or 5-digit rate, it will do that and discount part of those savings on its next bill to you.

Working the math for presorting is simple. If you have a weekly newsletter going to 500 different mail addresses, with two weeks of publishing hiatus, that's 25,000 pieces of mail at 34[cts.] per subscriber, or $8,500 in fulfillment postage.

At the 27.8[cts.] basic automation rate, it costs $6,950 to mail those 25,000 pieces, for a savings of $1,550--giving half of that to the presorter means you save $775. So if your subscription price is about $700 per year, basic presorting is worth one of those 500 subscribers. Presorting may not be advisable for small, one-letter newsletter publishers or start-up publishers, but if you have ten newsletters averaging 500 subscribers each, it may be worth it.

The commingling aspect of presorting also may make more attractive economics. Presort houses work because they commingle your mail with others using their service and they can get good economics of scale, particularly with high-speed (expensive) sorting equipment....

As with any vendor, if you use a presorter, shop around. For a list of presorters in your area, call the National Association of Presort Mailers at 877-620-6276.