Taking the Junk Out of Junk Mail

You may not know Jim Andersen or Tom Wicka, but they’ve been sending you mail for years. In a typical month, they drop 200 million pieces of mail into boxes and slots across the country. They send so much mail, in fact, that it takes 40 tractor-trailers a day to move it from their production facilities to postal stations nationwide.

“We put in the mail stream over 2 billion packages of mail a year,” says Andersen, CEO of IWCO Direct, a direct mail service provider headquartered in Chanhassen. “Every consumer in the United States has to get something from us.”

That doesn’t seem like an exaggeration, given that the company’s clients include well-known names such as locally based U.S. Bank and Best Buy, and national firms like Bank of America, Capital One, Office Max, Geico, and Progressive Insurance. IWCO Direct claims as one of its competitive advantages a one-stop-shop model that provides all aspects of direct mail production, database management, and distribution. The company employs an in-house creative staff that can help customers develop mail packages, as well as its own full-service production facilities for printing and mailing.

Anti–direct mail efforts "could force the Postal Service to take six-day service to your home down to probably three or four days," Andersen says.

“If we control everything in house, then we don’t have to outsource anything,” Andersen says. IWCO Direct doesn’t have to wait on a shipment of, say, envelopes or those faux plastic cards that accompany credit card offers. Its competitors often do.

IWCO Direct has an IT staff of 57 in its data management department, where its customers’ mailing lists are processed. Those lists are key to IWCO Direct’s customers tightly targeting their mailings based on models that include demographic, geographic, and psychographic information. The company’s headquarters are in a lockdown facility—after all, the building contains those golden mailing lists. Visitors use a wall phone to get into the lobby before receiving an electronic badge.

Yet another advantage, one that might be harder for competitors to replicate, lies in IWCO Direct’s mail sorting capabilities. Its method, Wicka says, allows IWCO Direct to go “very deep” into the Postal Service—dropping its pieces further beyond the local post office and closer to their final destination. This lets the company pass on a substantial discount on postage to its customers.