Arandell Corporation

“We are pleased to recognize and honor Arandell Corporation for its innovation, creativity and leadership,” said Steven J. Forte, USPS Senior Vice-President of Operations, who nominated the company for the award. “It has produced winning business results and supported the mailing industry.”

Arandell Corp., based in Menomonee Falls, WI, is a family-owned, privately held printer and mailer, producing and distributing high-quality catalogs and custom publications for the world’s leading marketers. It provides service to retail, consumer, business-to-business, brand and custom specialty organizations. Arandell offers single-source production which includes premedia, printing, bindery, personalization, data processing, co-mailing, mailing and distribution, logistics, website development and electronic commerce. 

According to the U.S. Postal Service, Arandell has been on the cutting edge of ecologically preferred methods of turning hazardous materials into productive uses, conserving resources and protecting the environment. Arandell is a test site for products limiting negative impact on air and water quality and misuse of land and makes capital investments in the latest and most-effective pollution control equipment.  Arandell has made a commitment to surpass Federal and State laws regulating water and air quality, and collaborates with suppliers and customers to implement programs limiting the environmental impact of its products throughout its life-cycle from manufacturing to disposal.

Arandell has received tri-certification in forestry management practices from the Forest Stewardship Council, Sustainable Forestry Initiative and Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification.  All three of these organizations are non-profit, non-governmental groups recognized globally for promoting responsible forest management. Arandell participates in the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources’ Green Tier program and is a SmartWay partner with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to protect our environment, reduce fuel consumption and improve air quality for future generations. It continues to invest in state-of-the-art pollution control equipment and recycles oil, paper, cartons, pallets, plastics, aluminum and steel. 

Arandell was among a select group of postal customers honored as “best in class” in the “Corporate Business Achievement” award category.

Founded in 1922 and based in Menomonee Falls, WI, Arandell Corporation provides high-quality premedia, printing, mailing, distribution, list management, database marketing strategies, education, logistics and consulting services to America’s premier custom publishers, catalogers and retailers. Arandell is on the cutting edge of ecologically-preferred methods for conserving resources and protecting the environment with its production practices.

Jim Treis, EVP, Sales & Marketing

Menomonee Falls, WI, Austin, Texas, April 15, 2010 - Arandell Corp., North America’s premier and most robust offset printing company, today announced a partnership with Digby, the leading provider of mobile commerce solutions for retailers, to power Arandell Mobile Solutions, providing retailers with mobile optimized extensions for their print catalogs. Additionally, Arandell and Digby have entered into an ongoing Strategic Marketing Agreement to develop innovative and cutting edge cross-channel marketing practices that fully leverage the complementary strengths of catalog, mobile and in-store channels.

 “Through our internal response analysis we conduct for our clients, catalogers who integrate a mobile solution into their overall marketing mix see a significantly higher customer response to their marketing messages, produce a higher customer average order and achieve higher customer retention” said Jim Treis, EVP Sales and Marketing at Arandell. “We chose to partner with Digby because of their expertise and experience in our market, coupled with the fact that their solution works seamlessly across multiple phone platforms. This combination makes Digby unique in the market. They were the natural choice to power for Arandell’s Mobile Solutions offering.”

Consumers are increasingly looking to their mobile devices to research products they are interested in. Making it easy and efficient for mobile users to find product specifications, access social content such as product ratings & reviews, share products with friends through integration with Facebook, and even access product availability in retailer’s stores, all of which are components of a comprehensive multi-channel strategy. Arandell and Digby have developed best practices and standards for catalog retailers that enable consumers to use their mobile device as part of the shopping experience. Mobile integration points include mobile friendly urls and bar codes that provide consumers with real time access to  relevant information for their purchase decision.

“Forward thinking retailers are treating mobility as a strategic opportunity and delivering an immersive mobile experience.” said Dave Sikora, CEO of Digby. “Our relationship with Arandell will allow us to deliver a compelling mobile experience that complements their direct mail and catalog initiatives.”

According to a recent survey by Ruder Finn¹, an independent public relations agency, 34% of mobile users use their devices to find background information on products or read product reviews. 

¹ Ruder Finn Mobile Intent Index (http://intentindex.com/mobile)

 For additional information, contact:

Katy McDermott
Marketing/Sales Analyst
Arandell Corporation
KMMcDermott@Arandell.com
www.Arandell.com

Stephen Slezak
Marketing Director
Digby
sslezak@digby.com
www.digby.com

Susan Pinter, Director of Postal Systems

The USPS recently made the following announcements regarding the 2010 Summer Sale and a newly-launched website regarding 5-Day Delivery.

2010 USPS Summer Sale

The USPS has announced the 2010 Standard Mail Summer Sale Program. To be eligible to participate in the 2010 event, a company must have mailed 350,000 or more Standard Mail letters and flats between July 1 and September 30, 2009 through Permit Accounts owned by the customer or through ghost permits. The sale offers eligible companies a 30% postage rebate for a predetermined volume threshold mailed between July 1 and September 30, 2010.

Additional information about the Summer Sale Program is available at

www.usps.com/summersale.

5-Day Delivery Website Address

The USPS has launched a website on usps.com to provide information to all customers about its proposal to implement a five-day street delivery schedule. The Postal Service proposes to end regular Saturday mail delivery to street addresses as part of a comprehensive plan to ensure that it can continue to deliver affordable service to the American people. Post Offices will remain open on Saturdays.

The website has a planning guide for businesses and household customers, as well as answers to frequently asked questions.

The site is live and can be visited at http://www.usps.com/communications/five-daydelivery.

If you have questions about either of these updates, please feel free to contact Arandell’s postal experts:

Don Landis (HDLandis@arandell.com)

Susan Pinter (SGPinter@arandell.com)

They can also both be reached at 800.558.8724.

Blake Hutchison, Director of Purchasing

Over the past three business days, we have seen the North American paper mills announce price increases.  The following is a list of mills, the affected grades, and when the increase takes effect:

 Appleton Coated:

• $1.50/CWT
• Effected grades:
  • Utopia 3
  • Utopia Book Family Grades
  • Utopia Film Coat
  • All private label grades
• All basis weights and finishes
• Effective with shipments April 1^st, 2010 or later.

 West Linn:

• $1.50/CWT
• Effected Grades:
  • Sonoma
  • Capistrano
  • Natureweb
  • Natureweb Plus
• All basis weights and finishes
• Effective with all new or existing orders shipped on or after April 1^st 2010.

 Verso:

• $1.50/CWT
• Effected Grades:
  • Influence
  • Velocity
  • Liberty
  • Advocate
  • Clarity
• All basis weights and finishes
• Effective with all orders entered immediately (3/15) and all order shipping on or after April 1^st 2010.

 Evergreen:

• $1.50/CWT
• Effected Grades:
  • TruSpec 4
  • TruSpec 4.5
  • TruSpec 5
• All basis weights and finishes
• Effective with orders entered immediately (3/16) and all orders shipping on or after April 1^st, 2010.

 AbitibiBowater:

• $1.50/CWT
• Effected Grades:
  • AbiBowGloss
  • AbiBowBright 76
  • AbiBowBright 80
  • AbiBowMax 84
  • AbiBow SCA
  • AbiBow SCB
  • AbiBow SNC
• All basis weights and finishes
• Effective for all new orders placed immediately and for all shipments effective May 1^st, 2010.

 NewPage

• $1.50/cwt
• Effected grades:
  • Arborweb
  • Orion
  • Vision
  • Escanaba
  • Dependoweb
  • Capri
  • Consoweb
• All basis weights and finishes
• Effective with new orders entered on or after March 15^th, 2010.

Why the increase?

In discussing these increases with the various mills, the most common answer has been their production COSTS. Indeed, those have been on a slow, but steady rise over the past six months, especially with the price of their primary input, pulp. The mills were able to absorb these rising costs as long as they were still making money from the Black Liquor tax credit, but now that it is gone (as of 12/31/09) they are hurting.

Another reason being given is the strength they are seeing in their order logs. Since November 2009, there has been an uptick in orders, and year over year paper shipment numbers have seen double digit increases since December 2009. The mills have curtailed so much production in the past 24 months that they believe they have been able to bring their supply level in line with demand. 

Will there be more?

My estimate is that the $1.50/cwt increase is only half of what the mills really want. I believe they initially wanted $3.00/cwt, but have since realized that perhaps two $1.50/cwt quarterly increases would be a more effective way to incrementally get what they desire. I very much expect to see another $1.50/cwt increase, effective July 1, 2010.

Gary Sierzchulski, VP, Arandell Data Services

A funny thing happened on the way to proclaiming the print catalog is dead……..IT’S STILL ALIVE!

If you have spent the early days of 2010 analyzing the results of your Fall and Holiday campaigns, you may have noticed something a little strange; emails, God love’em, were blasted out in record numbers in 2009. That was good news for me because I sold a lot of email appends.  As a result of all that clutter in peoples’ inboxes, not to be confused with mailboxes, the results were not all that impressive. In my humble opinion, direct marketers looking to cut costs as much as possible, yet still justify their existence, took the route of emails over direct mail to get the message to their customers, or in some cases to prospects. In many peoples’ analyses they noticed that the average transactional value in most cases significantly decreased. Marketers took the approach that more is better. Now many are discovering that more is not always effective. That’s the bad news for me - now they want answers as to why this approach did not always work. While marketers are trying to get a handle on this, we have seen the number of emails significantly decrease over the first two months of 2010, almost by the same amount they increased last year. Oh yeah…I forgot to mention that many are turning back to the direct side in the meantime.

Do not be confused; email campaigns are still highly critical to one’s overall marketing and branding efforts. What seems to have been lost is the fact that many of these email campaigns fail to “show me the money.” Just because they are cheap, it does not mean they are the best way to engage your customers. In order for an email campaign to be successful, the same tried and true direct marketing rules need to be applied. In fact, because emails are inexpensive there is no reason for the campaign NOT to be relevant, personal and recognizing the customers’ recent history with you. 

Here is a thought you may want to consider…if you have customers that have not purchased from you in the past six to nine months, conduct a test (isn’t that the beauty of direct marketing?). Take half of those customers and send them an email offer enticing them back to you. Then take the other half and send them a direct mail piece (catalog or similar) with the same message. I’ll bet you two things will happen: (1) your average transaction will be higher from the mailpiece as opposed to the email and (2) overall sales from the campaign will be higher. If you really want to get nuts, segment this group into thirds and the third group gets both the email and direct mail piece. 

However you want to do this, the important factor here is that you talk to these people as individuals. I was just at the Black Eyed Peas concert the other night along with 14,000 others. We were all there to see the great performance so we had that in common (like the customers who buy from you), but as I looked around, I realized I had very little else in common with those around me. So to “target” a message to this general audience about an after-concert party at a night club offering three-for-one shots of some kind of vodka until 3:00 a.m. on a work night would not interest me (actually it does but for this article the official word is that it does not). But a message telling me of a valet service that would also allow me a quicker exit from the place after the concert would be of great interest. The point is that your customers are very different from one another. You have the data to prove that. You do, right? If not call me ASAP. Now use it like there’s no tomorrow (because one never knows).

Me? I want to be media agnostic - use the best channel or channels for the specific campaign. But all channels should work together so your company will not only survive but thrive. 

Remember - your catalog is still the most important merchandising tool you have. Treat it as such.

Susan Pinter, Director of Postal Systems

Earlier this year, the United States Postal Service (USPS) announced the implementation of revised deflection requirements, which went into effect on January 4^th, 2010.  As a follow up to this implementation, the industry met with the USPS early this week to further discuss the challenges ahead with the droop/deflection requirement.  The revised rule states: if a piece does not comply with the deflection 3 inch rule, the piece drops to the Non-Automated Rates.  According to the USPS, the floppy pieces need to be taken off the machines and manually processed because the flimsy flats do not feed well on the automated equipment. In turn, this is incurring additional manufacturing and processing costs to the postal service. This will be a big impact for ALL mailers!!!  A perfect example is a Standard Mail Flat Catalog weighing less than 3 ounces - The postage will go from .262 cents per piece to .367 cents per piece. This is a 28% increase!!!  WOW, the catalogers are not happy with this rule, especially in today’s world of cutting costs and reducing page counts.

The industry continues to work with the USPS as partners to come up with solutions that benefit the mail owner along with their vendors: the Mailer and the USPS!  More to come…….

Jamie Marquardt, Director, Marketing & Communications

Happy Holidays to you and yours from all of us at Arandell Corporation! Our corporate blog’s innaugural year is nearing its end and we can’t begin to express how much we have enjoyed this addition to our marketing repetoire. Here are the links to your favorite articles to date:

A Flurry of Postal Updates: Droop Test, Move Update, Winter Sale, Dry Release Cards

Do you Pass the Droop Test?

9 Reasons to Mail More in 2010

No Postal Increase in 2010 - Really?

Canada Post Corp. Rate Changes Effective January 11, 2010

If you have any suggestions or requests for future blog posts, please send an email to blogging@arandell.com. We thank you for all of your feedback so far and look forward to adding more in the New Year.

On behalf of all of us at Arandell Corporation, we wish you a happy and safe holiday season.

Happy Holidays from all of us at Arandell Corporation.

Don Landis, VP, Postal Affairs

The postal world is always busy, but this week we have received quite a few updates and wanted to makes sure you were aware of the following:

1. DROOP TEST: As announced earlier this year, the USPS will be implementing revised deflection, or droop standards on January 4, 2010. It was announced today, however, that the penalty for not complying with those standards will not be enforced until June of 2010.

2. MOVE UPDATE: Just a reminder that the USPS will implement the penalty phase on the Move Update Standards on January 4, 2010. Catalogers must use one of these USPS approved methods: NCOALink, FASTforward, OneCode ACS, Address Change Service, Ancillary Service Endorsement without ACS. Those using an alternative addressing format such as “Or Current Resident” are not subject to the Move Update Standards.

3. WINTER SALE: We regretfully report that there will be no USPS Winter Sale. There will be a Spring Sale starting in April. Details to come the week of December 20. As soon as we can report more, we will send an update to all of you.

4. DRY RELEASE CARDS: Effective November 20, 2009, the USPS announced that it will allow dry release cards to be affixed to the outside of a catalog when the specifications defined here are met. (For catalogs, please refer to the section titled, “Flats with Attached Release Cards.”) Arandell Corporation is equipped to affix dry release cards and we are happy to work with you to create a catalog layout that adheres to these specifications.

For questions regarding these announcements or any other postal issues, please feel free to contact myself or Susan Pinter any time. We can also be reached at 800-558-8724.