Response documents are commonly used in direct mail advertising to solicit responses from consumers. Examples of response documents include discount coupons, magazine subscription literature and product survey questionnaires. Typically, the addressee's name and address is recorded or coded on one or more response documents, the documents are mailed, and, ideally, the addressee then directly or indirectly returns the response document to the sender. Once returned, the response documents are used to determine which addressees responded, and, in some direct mail applications, how they responded.
A typical direct mail application employs response documents in magazines to solicit magazine subscription renewals. An example of this type of application is described in Anderson et al. U.S. Pat. No. 3,819,173. In that patent, an addressee coded subscription card is inserted into an addressee-customized magazine while the magazine is being produced.
In a less common direct mail application, response documents in the form of discount coupons are coded with addressee information according to demographic information. This application entails selectively gathering different coupons for different addressees. The demographic information is used to determine which coupons would be most favorably responded to by each designated addressee. To effectively implement this technique, however, a substantial amount of manual assistance is required. For example, one such technique requires manually reviewing a list of coupons that are to be mailed to each addressee and then manually gathering the corresponding coupons. An addressee code is then stamped on each coupon before packaging and mailing the coupons to the addressee.
Recently, there has been a need to mail large volumes of different response documents to different addressees. Additionally, for efficient processing, the different response documents that are sent to each designated addressee are required to be coded with information that identifies the particular addressee. Unfortunately, known direct mail techniques are not useful in meeting this recent need. For example, direct mail techniques that require a substantial amount of manual assistance, such as the technique described above, are intolerably burdensome. The volume of addressees and response documents renders such a technique inefficient and prohibitively expensive.