Sometimes I feel as though my hands are tied when it comes to direct mail. I work with talented account executives and an awesome creative department, and they come up with innovative out-of-the-box direct mail ideas for our clients. Then it comes time to mail those pieces. This is where I come in.
I handle the estimating and production end of things at Envoy. First and foremost, I always look for the least expensive way to produce a project. That’s often easier said than done.
You want a direct mail piece to stand out from the pack, but with great creative and design, sometimes there’s a price to pay. I try to minimize that because postage can eat up a budget pretty quickly. I find it best to begin with the end: I submit a rough design to the USPS Business Unit for approval, and this gives me an idea about how much postage will cost.
The key to cost-effective postage rates is to have a mail piece that can be processed through automation — otherwise, you pay more in postage. If a direct mail piece doesn’t meet the USPS’s automated guidelines, then I’ll work with the post office and the printer to see what adjustments we can make that will reduce the postage cost. Sometimes we have to adjust the size of the piece, change the fold direction, apply a wafer seal, change paper stock or adjust a die cut.
Often, a really outstanding piece has to be altered to keep the cost of postage reasonable. The pieces are still effective, but everyone feels like a slave to the USPS. The post office knows that businesses need to do direct mail campaigns and that businesses want those campaigns to be creative and eye-catching. It just seems as if the USPS takes advantage of us by charging outrageous rates on “irregularly” shaped and sized pieces.
How has your business worked to keep direct mail costs under control while delivering innovative pieces? Or, do you figure the return on investment is worth the price of sending a creative piece that doesn’t meet certain USPS guidelines?
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