ANTenna Blog -- Business & E-Business

The US Postal Service is increasing the costs of stamps again. It'll now cost you 42 cents to mail a letter -- and you'll have to dig deeper to mail other items also. But the price of sending an e-mail hasn't changed.

The penny increase of the cost of the stamp doesn't seem like much, but for smaller businesses that do bulk mailings or do billing by mail, that'll hurt and, besides, for smaller businesses, every penny counts.

Other mailing increases include: "The cost to mail a Priority mail flat-rate envelope will increase 25 cents to $4.75. Express mail flat envelopes will also cost a quarter more, up to $16.50. International rates are also going up. Mailing letters to the United States' neighbors to the north and south, Canada and Mexico, will tick up to 72-cents. Most other countries will cost 94 cents."

Not only that: A new law regulating the Postal Service "makes it easier to raise rates as long as the agency does not exceed the rate of inflation. Rates can be adjusted each May."

Is this the push your business needs to stop snail-mailing invoices, marketing materials, and customer communications and start e-mailing them instead? It should be. E-mailing marketing, like e-newslettersfor instance, costs next to nothing, and if done well, can do wonders for your smaller business (not to mention the environment).

And you can also track if your customers are reading the material you're sending out or not.

I'm sure your postman is nice, but even he or she cannot do that.