All types of small businesses can benefit from the individuality and creativity custom stamps provide, including car dealerships, realtors, restaurants, designers, service professionals and many others. Ironically, some small Internet companies that rely mainly on email for communication have been first to jump on custom “snail mail” postage. “So much of our daily communications are done online that when we reach out to clients via the mail we want to make our correspondence unique and compelling,” says Ahnee Min, of SearchRev, a search engine marketing firm in Palo Alto, CA.

1. Custom stamps were first limited to consumer use only, but recently got the USPS nod to include business brands and logos.   
2. Custom stamps can be used to mail letters, postage or packages and come in many denominations. You can do it all online.
3. Each sheet of 20 custom stamps in the 39-cent first class denomination costs about $13 if you buy at least 100 sheets. That’s 65 cents per stamp, or an extra 26 cents per stamp over-and-above the cost of the postage.
4. You don’t have to buy multiples of the same design in order to get quantity discounts. You get the discount on multi-sheet orders even if you use a variety of different designs. And if you have a direct mail campaign in mind, special pricing is available for large orders.
   

Action Steps
The best contacts and resources to help you get it done

Tips & Tactics
Helpful advice for making the most of this Guide

• The online ordering process is fairly simple and offers leeway to design just the type of stamp you want. You upload your digital photo or business logo and use the online design tools to position it (including zoom, move and rotate features) and finish creating your custom postage.
• The large format stamps can be customized in a broad array of colors, layout and text styles, as well as in vertical or horizontal orientation.
• Because of the authentication technology used to print the stamps, most postal machines will not leave postmarks on the postage, so your recipients will see your creation unblemished.
• Why stop with just putting your logo on stamps. Officials at Stamps.com recommend using PhotoStamps to announce special events or even new menu items for a restaurant, send business gifts or help launch new products. The possibilities are almost endless.
• Custom stamps measure approximately 1.5" by 2.5". You can design the postage to use either vertical orientation (portrait) or horizontal orientation (landscape).
• The PhotoStamps system accepts these image formats: JPEG (.jpg), GIF (.gif), BMP (.bmp), TIFF (.tif), PNG (.png), Macintosh Pict Format (.pct), and PhotoShop format (.psd). Image must be less than 5 MB in size.
• The impact of seeing yourself or your logo in blazing color on an official U.S. postage stamp is significant. And if you are sending, say, holiday greetings, thank you cards or other correspondence, Zazzle can outfit your business with printed cards to match your stamp (or vice versa).