Marketers have long known the value of sending a CD or DVD, but the costs of mailing such a disk often make the program inefficient.

That’s why Peter Gustafsson knows he has a hit on his hands.

Gustafsson, chief executive officer of Expericard AB in Stockholm, has created and patented a mailer that allows you to send a disk for little more than the cost of mailing a postcard. Widely used in Europe, the Expericard is just catching on in the United States.

He’s been able to achieve automated letter rates for the mailer, which means you can ship a disk for about what it would cost to send a postcard a huge savings that has U.S. marketers intrigued.

Key to the entire program is a production process that Gustafsson developed and patented that inserts the disk into the mailer, seals it and addresses it, all at high speed and with full automation. Most important, the process reads a barcode on the Sony disk and then matches that to the mailing list so that the name and address on the mailer match the information on the disk.

That unique nature of the product has been key to its impressive response rates, Gustafsson says. Gustafsson notes that one travel operator moved from sending a two-pound catalog to an 18-gram mailing that carries a mini-DVD with 71 minutes of beautiful vistas on it.

Ironically, it was the failure of a project that led to the creation of this innovative carrier. Gustafsson and his ad agency partner at the time were working on a pension fund campaign that involved mailing a CD of information. The disks were inexpensive, but the padded envelope and labor needed to insert the disk made the program too costly, so it was abandoned.

“I said, ‘Think if we’d just been able to make it as simple as a postcard,’ and my partner said, ‘Yeah, that would have been great,’” Gustafsson recalls.

Doing so wasn’t easy finding glue that would seal the package correctly at high speed took three months but resulted in a cost-efficient mailer that gives companies a new way to communicate.

Gustafsson hears arguments that a company “can do that on the Internet” instead of sending a disk, but counters that bandwidth limits the resolution that can be delivered and that the “push” created by sending mail pays for itself.

Observes Gustafsson: “It costs a lot of money to tell you the content is there on the Internet.”