We have spoken in a previous article about the advertising mail discount available from the Royal Mail for Direct Mail campaigns and the article can be found here. This in summary is a big discount for mail pieces applied where the recipient does not expect the mail piece.
To become a Hybrid Mail supplier, you have to be able to clean the recipient address data. By this we mean that you match the data against the Royal Mails in house Postal Address File (PAF). If a piece of data is matched then a Mailmark or barcode can be created which means that the mail piece is machine readable. When the mail is presented to the Royal Mail by the hybrid mail partner they know that the address is correct and it is machine readable. Thus it is cheap for them to process and a they can offer a discounted postal rate.
Presenting the mail in an acceptable machinable format which makes the mail easy for them to handle. They are all the same way and the barcode and indicia has a clear zone which the machines need
Mail is pre sorted to the 86 UK SIC areas which in simplest form are the postcode areas like EX or SW. The mail is then taken to a regional sortation office in palletised trays (called yorks). The trays have labels on them which are gunned and then separated out.
Multiple jobs are laid up together at the production stage and as such they are all printed together using state of the art digital printing equipment.
