Save the U.S. Postal Service (and Rate Increase)

I was recently reading this post on the postal service rate increase coming up. Personally, I always hate to see it, but know it’s a necessary evil of the times.

However, this article in particular was really depressing. They said the effects of the rate increase are a “drop in the bucket”. I own my own business and it’s second nature to me to automatically think about how I could improve and optimize anything related to my business and this habit also slops over to other people’s businesses too. (And unfortunately results in me handing out a lot of unsolicited advice much to my husband’s dismay.)

So, I was thinking, what could be done to save the post office in this changing world of mail? There is an evolutionary turn happening in that industry and I thought about several things — first of all the future of letter writing if the post office is in serious trouble and second, what would I do if I was in this type of business? It’s not a simple fact of just changing some business practices… the real problem is that if you don’t have a crystal ball, how do you know how to evolve your business when your entire industry is flipping on its axis?

It’s a really tough question! Maybe we need to come up with some of our own ideas. We can march to Washington with our list and wait outside the Postmaster General’s office. It may take letter writers to save them.

What should they do? How about:

1. Celebrity endorsements like the “got milk?” campaign. Good grief, if drinking milk can be made to look cool, how hard could it be to make letter writing cool?
2. Create a more profitable division of the USPS such as a product division where you can have a lot of low wholesale cost, high profit merchandise. This has been done to a small extent, but not done nearly as well as it COULD be.
3. Have you noticed how well the U.S. Mint is doing? Take a clue from the Mint and capitalize on the needs and desires of collectors.
4. Hook the children early. A snail mailer’s club with quarterly or monthly newsletter. Get kids excited about sending letters and chances are it’s a love that will stay with them all their lives.
5. Encourage and promote mail art. Support mail artists and their showings. Marketing department needs to highlight more interesting things that go through the mail.
6. Grass roots campaigns. Utilize passionate local citizens to do your marketing for you. Enthusiastic volunteers can teach letter writing classes through local libraries — from nuts and bolts how-to classes to more creative and free-spirited methods of communicating by mail. This one has limitless possibilities and could be a good money maker since the only investment would be in coordinating the program. The cost on a local level is nearly nothing since it’s all done on a volunteer basis.
7. More school outreach, also on volunteer basis.
8. Form an unpaid advisory commission of passionate and enthusiastic and knowledgeable letter writers to meet 2-3 times per year to help plan and design low-cost, high return programs.

Okay, those are my ideas… please add your own in the comments section. If you will do your part and help brainstorm ideas I will put them all in a professional format and petition to Postmaster General to heed our call for change at the USPS. Let’s do it in time for the rate hike in May. Let’s get to work!

Tags: letter writing, marketing, post office, postal service, postmaster general, rate increase