Reno direct-mail company developing tracking system

Admit it: You didn't give it a second thought when the bar codes that accompany addresses on many direct-mail pieces where expanded so that the bars extended up and down from the center line instead of just up.

But Michael Hemphill paid close attention, and his company, CSG Direct Inc., is beginning to reap the benefits.

CSG Direct Inc. of Reno used the expanded bar codes to develop a way to track the progress of every single piece of a direct-mail campaign as it works its way through the nation's post offices.

Those tracking reports are common among small-parcel carriers such as FedEx and UPS, but the processes used by the U.S. Postal Service to move its massive volumes of mail stymied development of a similar system for traditional mail.

"This has been the dream in direct mail for decades," said Hemphill, who says the CSG?system is the first of its kind in the nation.

He said the lack of tracking information has been maddening for direct-mail marketers, who typically dropped mail into the Postal

Service pipeline and then could only wait for it to pop out at the other end. In some cases, Hemphill said, direct mail campaigns mysteriously disappeared for as long as 30 days before arriving in mailboxes.

The Postal Service began rolling out its Intelligent Mail barcode system in late 2006. The expanded barcode it uses four different types of bars that ascend and descend from a center line allows direct mailers to pack more data about the identity of each individual piece of mail into the code that's printed on the address label.

Hemphill and the software programming team at CSG developed a way to use that information to provide real-time tracking that customers can access from their personal computers.

Unlike the tracking systems provided by private carriers such as FedEX, the CSG system doesn't allow customers to see when a mailed piece actually arrives in a mailbox. That's because the postal service, unlike the private companies, doesn't require delivery personnel to scan the bar code of each piece of mail they deliver.

Still, Hemphill says, the arrival of mail at a destination post office is far more information than mailers have received in the past.

The CSG software tracked one piece of mail, for instance, after it was dropped at a post office in Las Vegas mid-afternoon on a recent

Thursday. By 4:04 p.m. on Saturday, the piece had arrived in mid-Florida. It worked its way through a Postal Service sorting center that day and was delivered to the destination post office at 12:57 on

Monday morning.

The company does a lot of direct-mail work for casinos across the country, and Hemphill says those clients are particularly interested in tracking the delivery of marketing pieces to their customers.

The real-time tracking system also will allow customers to learn how to time their mailings to avoid delays and also may provide information about locations where the nation's mail stream clogs up.

That's important information to mail houses such as CSG Direct, which has handled more than 211 million pieces of direct-mail in the past four years.

CSG's investment to create the software? "More time than money," says Hemphill. The company launched the service about 90 days ago, providing it for free to its customers.