With all the aspects of a Direct Mail Campaign, we still consider the timing and the cost to be the two most important. If you don’t hit these targets head on, it could ruin your campaign and tarnish your business. There are a few ways to ensure that you mail at the right time and at the right price. Here are a few ways to make this happen:
- Create a schedule calendar for everyone involved in the project. That way they can see their role in the process and how it will impact the drop date.
- Get pre-approval first. Send your mailpiece to us at Wordtech. We can look it over and make sure that it fulfills all of the necessary requirements. This is especially important to nonprofit mailers. A simple word or two is the difference in a 40% increase is postage. We can make sure that it is accepted at the Bulk Mail Acceptance Unit.
- Allow enough time for final approval (internal or external). Make certain that you have built into the schedule enough time to make any necessary adjustments to the mailpiece. Check with your printer to see about delivering the printed piece in time for the mail room.
- Check with your vendors before you commit to a timeline with your client. Sometimes their schedules will have changed unexpectedly. The printer that normally turns around your printed pieces in five days may have just received a big job and now your job will take 10 days to complete. If it’s an ongoing program, lock in your printing and mailing preparation rates for as far as you can in the future. Otherwise, something like a sudden spike in paper costs could blow your production budget out of the water three months down the road.
- Stay away from hand-insertion. Take into consideration the end result and the work that may be needed. Check with us if you think that the mailpiece might need some extra loving. Don’t get caught in the design trap—this may add extra days to production not to mention a huge increase in cost! Wordtech is now capable of hand-inserting larger than normal pieces. Call us to learn more!
- Just say “No” to flats. If your piece exceeds a maximum size of 6 inches by 10.5 inches for most categories of letter mail, it will mail as a flat, and at a substantial increase in postage. Another rule to be aware of is to mail the mail piece meeting the correct “aspect ratio” (width divided by height). This is a very common mistake that designers make and can create an unexpected cost to the client.
- Presort! If you need to mail first class, either because of time constraints, or because content within the mail piece requires it to be sent at first class rates, reduce your postage costs on first class pieces by presorting them. One of the processes that WordTech offers is NCOA/ Address Standardization and Presort.
- Allow enough time for the mailman. If there isn’t a compelling reason to mail at first class rates, take advantage of bulk, or presort standard, rates. Just make sure you allow the 10 to 14 days needed for in-home delivery.
Following these rules will keep your project on track and on budget. Give us a call if you have any questions or concerns about your direct mail campaign.
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