Mail Presorts

Many mailers prefer to presort their mail to lower their postage costs. Since you’re doing a good deal of the work, the Postal Service can spend less time and money to process and deliver your mail, so they pass on the discount on to you. Essentially, “presorting” means grouping your letters together by selected address components, such as SCF, 5-Digit ZIP code, ZIP+4, Carrier Route as well as class, size, weight and mailing piece content.

There are three basic classes of presorted mail: Marketing class (formerly Third class, aka bulk mail), which has a 200-piece minimum, and is used for mailing pieces that aren’t personalized. In fact, it’s required that all the pieces in a marketing class mailing have the same content – i.e., catalogs, coupons, flyers and advertising literature.

Second class is used exclusively for periodicals and publications and has many requirements, which must be met to get the associated postal discounts. Periodical rates are for authorized publications which mail at least 4 times per year at a stated frequency from a known office of publication and formed of printed sheets.

The publications which mail at these rates primarily consist of:

• General publications.
• Publications of institutions and societies.
• State departments of agriculture Publications.
• Requester publications.
• Foreign publications.

Limits apply to advertising percentage and mail piece components (e.g., independent material and products are not permitted at Periodicals prices).

First class is used for personalized mail, such as invoices and account statements and has a 500-piece minimum.

There are over 200 variations and postage levels based on your particular mailing piece configuration and the postal requirements met by your proposed mailing. For example, if your mailing consists of generic advertising pieces, mailing at the Marketing mail level will save a lot of money. (If you are a non-profit organization, there will be additional postage savings on top of that.)

Most of the time, not all your mailing pieces will qualify for optimum postage rates so, rather than bump the entire mailing down a level or two, which also bumps up the cost, presorts are often produced in tiers. The first tier would include those pieces that qualify for the most economical level, the next tier for those that meet the next best set of postal options, and so forth. While most mailings are a combination of up to four tiers, the USPS will accept them, greatly simplifying the process at your end.