Getting Started – Tips & Tricks

• Formatting and designing your files—for best visual results on letter-sized paper, increase your margins to ½ inch.
• Postcards, bifolds, and trifolds—each of these mailing types uses a specific template that you can download from the “Manual Build” section of the home page.
• Envelopes—you can download these templates from the “Envelope Design Gallery” on the home page.
• Your Postalocity Meter—Think of this as a prepaid card—you preload funds onto the meter and then when you are ready to approve, we withdraw the funds out of your meter to pay for the job.
• Prepayment options—Are you prepaying by ACH, check, or credit card? If you send a check by mail, please submit your prepayment at least 3 days before you plan to approve your job, to allow us time to receive it. If you are sending an ACH payment, allow 1 business day for the bank transfer to take place. If you are paying by credit card, be aware that you will incur a 2.9% transaction fee.
• NCOA PAF—A confirmed and valid Processing Acknowledgement Form is legally required before Postalocity can show you the list of people who have submitted moves to the US Postal Service within the past 4 years. You can choose not to update addresses in your mailing, but we still recommend downloading the list of address updates for your records.
• Address quality—Plan to spend at least 10 minutes per each 1,000 pieces reviewing address quality after we have processed your documents. For larger mailings, you may choose to take a whole day to review and correct low quality addresses. Our automated system is built to search for the best USPS standardized addresses, and sorts pieces that do not match up with a standardized address into a low-quality category. Many of these addresses simply have typos or lack spaces and proper abbreviations. Others have harder issues to fix. For more information, you may find this link to the Postal Explorer Addressing Standards page helpful.
• Manual corrections – Make these one at a time in each mail piece page.
• Bulk address corrections – Download a list of addresses and make changes on Excel, uploading them later.
• Do NOT reprocess after making manual address corrections!
• Accuracy & digital proofs—What you see is what you get, in Postalocity. You are in full control of how your documents look when they mail out. The first step of approval will always show you a random sampling of mail pieces, including the envelopes and any inserts included. If you need to look at a specific mail piece, click on the “Search All Mailpieces” button on Step 1 of approval to do a quick search by Address or by Document ID. You can then view your document by clicking “Download Mail Piece PDF” on the right-hand side of the Mail Pieces page.
• Pop-ups—Please enable pop-ups for postalocity.com, as you will not be able to see individual mail piece proofs job if pop-ups are disabled.
• Archival access to your data—Postalocity is designed to give you exactly the amount of data that you want. Want a USB Archive? Select that option under “expunge job” in your job settings. Want a proof of mailing? We generate a mailing affidavit as soon as we scan your last piece to go in the mail truck. All of the address lists we generate can be downloaded from the Mail Piece pages via the address quality links on Step 2 of approval.

Quality & Accuracy Checklist

Before Processing

• Do you want to change any of the default settings?
• Do you want to change any of your preferences from the previous year?
• Do you want to change your Move Update setting or your Endorsement?

After processing—Before approval:

• Does your envelope look the way you expected or requested on the proof?
• Are there any visual elements within your mail piece proof (not including the left margin) that are missing or different from what you would like to mail?
• If you expect to mail an insert, do you see it on the proof?
• Are the merge and endorsement settings set to your preference?
• Is there a large amount of bad addresses? Do you plan to correct those addresses? Have you already ensured that all settings-determined changes to the statements are correct before performing any manual address corrections?
• Is the mail date on Step 3 of approval the date that you plan to mail?
• Does your “Breakdown by Type” show you more flats or priority mail than you expect? Priority boxes may be manually ignored and sent digitally to save on postage costs.
• Does the “Total Documents” count on Step 5 of approval match the total count of statements you expect to mail? Add up totals from all jobs generated, if you have separate jobs for different document types. If the final sum does not match up, call us immediately.

After Approval:

• We begin printing your statements as soon as possible. Sometimes the very day you approve. Various piece weights and paper types determine which statements print first, and your files may be separated into a number of separate batches that may print on separate days. If you have ANY changes or corrections after approval, contact us ASAP. We cannot guarantee an automatic unapproval for fixes, and your mail date may be pushed back due to time constraints.
• Mailing Affidavits will automatically post to each job page as soon as all batches within that job have been mailed. You may log in to Postalocity to download your mailing affidavits as soon as 4 p.m. on the mail date.
• Your jobs will remain on Postalocity as a fully-searchable online archive for the selected archival time frame. If you have selected no archive, all files and addresses will be deleted 30 days after the mail date, and you will only see the basic meta-information such as piece counts and settings selections.

Have any questions about something else? 

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