A mailing job usually stalls before it reaches the press. The list arrives in the wrong format, someone exports it, cleans it in separate software and re-imports it, and the customer still doesn’t know the postage cost until after they’ve ordered. Jim Mann, Business Development Manager at BCC Software, started in mailing 30 years ago, in what he calls the days of “spray and pray”. He’s watched address data go from an afterthought to the thing that decides whether a mailing arrives and what it costs. On day one of Printing United 2026 in Las Vegas, he sat down with Greg Young, Head of Customer Experience at Infigo, to talk about direct mail data and what changes when that work moves inside the order itself.
They spoke at booth N7149, two weeks after the two companies announced their partnership. Connect: BCC Software brings BCC Architect REACH™ service into the Infigo ordering journey for US mailings: when a customer uploads a mailing list, BCC Software checks every address against USPS standards, presorts the list and calculates postage before checkout.
Key takeaways
- In early testing, cleansing and presorting a 2,010-record list and moving it from First-Class single piece to Marketing Mail automation cut postage from $0.78 to $0.4494 per piece, a 42% saving. Most of that saving comes from the change of mail class, and results vary with list quality and volume.
- Jim Mann says mailing delays start well before production, in exporting, cleaning and re-importing lists across separate tools. Connect: BCC Software runs that work inside the Infigo order.
- Checking addresses against USPS standards at upload shows customers which addresses are likely to be delivered and which need correcting, before they commit to print and postage.
- One early-interest Infigo customer plans to hand list control back to its own customers rather than rely on an in-house mailing team, prompted by a team member’s upcoming retirement.
- Jim Mann’s view on AI: direct mail data has to be accurate first, or AI campaigns won’t succeed.
- Jim Mann estimates around 40 million people in the US move each year, and not all of them file a change of address. He sees services such as Proprietary Change of Address as possible additions for commercial printers.
- USPS promotions reward mailers for adding value. In 2026, adding Informed Delivery to a qualifying promotion, such as the 5% Integrated Technology promotion, earns a further 1%.
Why did Infigo and BCC Software partner?
Greg Young: I’m joined today by Jim Mann from BCC Software, Infigo’s latest partner. We announced it in the lead-up to this show, and we’ve been demonstrating it this morning. It’s already gained a huge amount of interest, and I think our partnership is probably well overdue. It’s something we at Infigo have been asked for a long, long time: to bring something to the market utilizing your technology and our technology together.
When you look at the industry today, what’s the biggest change you think customers are asking technology and industry partners and vendors to respond to?
Jim Mann: Commercial printers use a lot of technology, and we keep hearing the same thing: in order for us to run the business, we have all kinds of applications we need to work. What they’re really looking for is taking their best-of-breed applications and integrating them into what I would call their staple application.
That’s what’s great about this partnership, because it aligns very well. Infigo is that application they use to run their operation. And now we’re just adding the mail preparation, the data quality and presorting piece into that process. It’s a much, much more efficient process for them.
Greg Young: In the previous fireside chat I had Mr. PrintOS, Bob Raus from HP, and we were talking about industry vendors staying in their own lane. So we work together, and we’ve been very selective over the years about the partners we work with, because we want to make sure that, to coin your phrase, it’s the best of breed. We want to make sure we’re working with the experts in that field to bring a joined-up solution back to our customers.
And going back to my point about the excitement around this: you guys are so well known in your space, and Infigo is well known in our storefront and workflow space. We bring those two together, and that creates one hell of a solution.
Where do print and mail businesses lose the most time with direct mail data?
Greg Young: Where do you think print and mail businesses are still losing the most time when processing data? And how can connected platforms like us make a change in that space?
Jim Mann: I think the delays are well before production. On the data side of things, what we’re hearing is that it’s really about all the disparate touchpoints. You’ve got the typical mailing process: mailers are importing data, they’re moving it here, and they’re doing all those disparate processes. They want to eliminate those, or at least reduce them.
When you look at the integration, you’ve pretty much eliminated all of those steps, because it builds into the Infigo ecosystem from start to finish. So you don’t have all those disparate touchpoints.
The same idea applies to artwork. At Printing United 2025, Enfocus’s Davy Verstaen explained how catching PDF errors at upload stops bad files reaching production: watch last year’s fireside chat on preflight automation.
Greg Young: We’ve just been talking to one of our customers, one of the ones that have shown some early interest. They said: we’ve got a mailing team at the moment, but we’re going to make a mindset shift, because we’re going to put the control back in the customers’ hands. We don’t need to worry about the mailing team being responsible.
They said one of their team was about to retire, and this is a perfect point in their journey to revisit what this now looks like. Let’s empower the people who are responsible for the data, rather than it being an internal thing. I think that’s going to be a real shift we see from our side. It’s something we’re always trying to do: what more can we do about empowering our end users to have more control?
How is postal intelligence becoming part of the customer journey?
Greg Young: How do you see postal intelligence becoming more deeply embedded into the customer journey?
Jim Mann: I started 30 years ago, and those were the days of spray and pray: stuff as much mail into the system as you can and hope it gets to the end user. Hope’s not a strategy. There wasn’t a lot of intelligence, but today there’s a lot of intelligence built into the application itself.
With the integration Infigo has set up, you’re leveraging that. On the data quality and address validation side, you can show customers immediately which addresses have a high likelihood of getting delivered, because they meet USPS standards. They’re standardized, and they meet all the elements of a proper USPS address. We can tell them which ones are questionable, and which ones I would spend a little time on to correct them.
That’s on the address quality side. When you get into the postal mail preparation side, we’ll supply the end users with all the information they need to actually produce the mailing: what package does this piece go in, what’s the sequence number. You provide all that information to the end user so they can run their production environment on the back end.
And I think one of the up-and-coming trends is this: if you’re using our tracking services, there’s a lot of intelligence around the predictability of when the mail gets to the intended address. So now you can do other things with that information, like trigger a marketing campaign, social media, an email, a phone call or whatever.
Where does AI fit in postal data?
Greg Young: The big question, the big buzzword at the moment: AI.
Jim Mann: It is the top conversation everywhere. Everybody’s talking about it, and everybody’s trying to find their way with AI. What I’m hearing in the postal industry is, first and foremost, the data has to be accurate in order for AI to be successful, for your AI campaigns.
I look at BCC’s output, the data we’re providing and the intelligence that’s enabling AI, where now AI can take over and do things to make it faster and help companies with better business decisions. We’re seeing a little bit of that around pre-production, if you’re dealing with data that’s unformatted. AI can help there. Hyper-personalization, too: when you’re building out your address labels, if you’re doing personalization and you want to target the individual instead of a segment of the market, AI can help in those areas.
I touched on it earlier, but it also helps with marketing campaigns, so that you can measure ROI and measure the success of the campaigns. That’s where AI can do things a little bit faster, and that’s what we’ve been hearing in the market.
Greg Young: Again, in the session we just had with Bob from HP, he said he’s a firm believer at the moment in AI surfacing historical data. A lot of people think AI is the vision, it’s the future. Rather than looking forward, he’s talking about actually using it to look backwards. What can we understand from the last one, two, three years, or maybe even just one, two, three months, and make business decisions on that?
I’d not personally thought about it that way, because I’m thinking it is the future. Actually, looking back makes a lot of sense.
Data-led decisions came up at Printing United 2025 too, when printIQ’s Craig Powell talked about how print businesses use MIS data and AI to decide what to do next: watch last year’s fireside chat on MIS profitability.
What should Infigo and BCC Software build next?
Greg Young: Looking ahead, what would you like to see us develop and explore together to create more for our mutual customers? I appreciate we’re at very, very early stages, and it’s only just launched. But where do you see this going?
Jim Mann: I think what we have today is the core foundation. Mailers or commercial printers can use the service today and do a mailing. But I think there’s additional value in two areas.
One is some additional address quality tools. To give you an example, we provide move update services through Infigo. If somebody moves, they’ll fill out a card with the United States Postal Service. There’s something like 40 million people that move a year, so that’s about 4,500 moves an hour. We have a service called Proprietary Change of Address, because not everybody that moves fills out a card. There are different services like that we probably want to talk about, to see if it makes sense for commercial printers to add them.
But I think the real transformative piece for us is the digital journey. It’s really helping customers do physical mail and digital mail, and complement them together.
Greg Young: In harmony, and how that then creates the overall campaign.
Jim Mann: Right now you’re seeing in the market, and the United States Postal Service is reporting, that if you combine those two together, you’re seeing response rates that are 2 to 3 times what they would be if you just did mail by itself. So the data is already pointing towards…
Greg Young: Really showing us what that future needs.
Jim Mann: This is an area where we need to make sure everybody is taking advantage.
Editor’s note: the 2 to 3 times figure is Jim’s summary. The most widely cited study on this, from Merkle in 2015, found that campaigns combining direct mail with one or more digital channels saw a 118% lift in response compared with direct mail alone.
What does BCC Software do, in one sentence?
Greg Young: If you were to explain what BCC does in one easy sentence, what would it be?
Jim Mann: What BCC does is remove the postal compliance overhead from the process, while adding intelligence to make sure your communications are actually getting to the intended recipient.
What one piece of friction would you remove from the customer journey?
Greg Young: If we could remove one piece of friction from the customer journey, what would you choose, and how could our partnership help make that even better?
Jim Mann: Let’s face it, postage isn’t going down. And when I say postage, it’s really about the ROI: how do you help customers get the most out of mail? I think where we can partner is more on education, helping customers take advantage of USPS promotions.
There are actual promotions out there where the post office is helping customers reduce postage, giving them an incentive to take advantage of some of the more modern technology. They have a promotion right now where if you add Informed Delivery to your program, they’ll give you a 1% postage discount. If you use specialized inks and papers, they’ll give you another 3 to 5% discount.
So it’s not just about reducing the cost. It’s about incentivizing mailers or commercial printers to add more value. That’s what they’re really focused on, and what they’re really trying to help with.
Editor’s note: the discounts Jim describes are part of the 2026 USPS promotions. Current rates and dates are on the USPS promotions page.
Greg Young: And it’s how we then bring that to the forefront for people. Where can people find out more about BCC and what you do?
Jim Mann: The best place to start is to go to bccsoftware.com. We have all our information out on that page, and that’s where I would begin.
How does Connect: BCC Software work?
Connect: BCC Software puts BCC’s Architect REACH™ service inside the Infigo storefront. The customer uploads a mailing list, maps its columns and picks a mailing type. BCC standardizes every address against USPS data, adds ZIP+4 codes and delivery point barcodes, presorts the list and prices it per piece. The customer then sees each record marked ready to mail, not deliverable, or deliverable but flagged, with the reason, and can download the cleaned list and the CASS and NCOA reports.
Customers see the full cost of the mailing, print and postage, before they commit, so you can quote and win the whole job instead of the print alone. See a mailing list go from upload to postage in the cart: book a Connect: BCC Software demo.
In early testing, a 2,010-record list priced at $0.78 per piece as First-Class single piece came down to $0.4494 per piece once cleaned and presorted as Marketing Mail automation, a 42% saving. Most of that saving comes from the change of mail class, and savings vary with list quality and volume. Read the full announcement: Infigo partners with BCC Software to bring address cleansing and real-time postage pricing to web-to-print.
About BCC Software
BCC Software builds address quality, mail preparation and postal logistics software for the US direct mail industry. Its Architect REACH™ service is a cloud-based postal preparation API that handles address validation and USPS mail preparation. Find out more at bccsoftware.com.
About Infigo
Infigo provides web-to-print automation solutions for PSPs, helping them streamline order capture, file preparation, and production workflows.
