Whether you own a business or work for one, chances are that you send and receive numerous emails every day. Maybe you sometimes even feel that you are drowning in them, that they all become one big blur. This is why customized postage is beginning to take hold for certain uses among businesses. A piece of “snail mail” arriving with tastefully done customized postage can really be noticed.

Of course, email has many advantages over physical mail, as the use of the word snail implies. Email is much, much faster. It is easier. It doesn’t require the cutting down of trees to make paper. But for some applications, the use of customized postage makes a lot of sense.

It can impress people. Of course, some people will not be favorably impressed by advertisements on postage, so logos or images may be a better choice for businesses!

It was only in May 2006 that the US Congress authorized a trial for businesses to put their logos, messages, and images on customized postage. Relatively few businesses are doing it yet. Hewlett Packard received some publicity for being the first large company to use this new thing, creating postagethat include its logo, photos of founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, and a photo of the garage where HP began.

Due to the widespread use of email, the number of items shipped by the US Postal Service has dropped by at least two billion since 1998. Customized postage won’t reverse that trend but might make a small dent in it.