Customer communication is core to how organizations build trust, drive action, and retain business, and it’s getting more expensive to do.
USPS rates increase on July 12, 2026, with the First-Class Mail Forever stamp moving from 78 cents to 82 cents and overall mailing services prices rising about 4.8 percent. For organizations sending high volumes of statements, notices, and marketing mail, the cost adds up fast. A 100,000-piece monthly First-Class program will see roughly $4,000 more per month, or nearly $48,000 a year, from this increase alone.
The reality is that no single tactic solves this. The organizations that come out ahead build a communication strategy that optimizes efficiency, reach, and spend across every channel and every piece.
Two areas of opportunity carry the most weight:
The first is presort.
First-Class Presorted Automation Letter rates are rising an average of 5%, from $0.635 to $0.667 per piece, but even at the new rates, presorted pricing delivers meaningful savings over retail postage. The catch is volume. Most organizations don’t mail at the threshold USPS requires to qualify on their own. Partnering with a provider like OSG removes that barrier. Your mail enters the postal stream alongside thousands of other organizations’ pieces, unlocking presort discounts without the in-house volume requirement, and the savings often more than offset the cost of outsourced production.The second is digital.
Email, SMS, and online document delivery reach customers faster, at a fraction of the cost of physical mail. The work is making the shift appealing, not just available. Customers opt in at higher rates when communications emphasize convenience, speed, and environmental benefit, and giving people the flexibility to choose their channel tends to drive higher engagement on the communications themselves.Around those two opportunities sit the components that quietly add up. List hygiene and address verification keep every mailed piece working. Paper stock, envelope size, and piece dimensions can surface savings most teams haven’t revisited in years. Postal spend analysis reveals where the next opportunity is hiding. Each on its own is incremental. Together, they’re material.
This is where an experienced partner matters. Presort qualification, digital migration, list hygiene, mail piece design, and spend analysis don’t operate independently. A change to one affects the others, and optimizing in isolation tends to leave savings on the table somewhere else. The right partner brings the volume, the infrastructure, and the analytics to tie everything together into a coordinated strategy.
That’s the difference between cutting postage costs and building a communication strategy that delivers on efficiency, reach, and spend at once.
Ready to get ahead of the July 12 increase?
Contact us to learn how OSG can help.