Mailers: Best Practices & ways to keep the USPS happy!
Sending snail mail is a lot of fun! Finding a beautiful card, crafting a thoughtful message, and handwriting an address is not only a thoughtful thing to do, but it can be a great self care tactic and time to reflect. Then you get your stamps, pop it in the mail box, and your United States Postal Service handles the rest.
When it comes to sending out a mailer to several hundred or thousands of addresses that’s where it can get a little tricky.
Fear not, we send a lot of mailers and will walk you through the entire process.
The basics:
First class, pre-sort standard, non-profit postage, mail permit, etc. are terms we will use with you. The best way to explain this is to walk you though a project.
Let’s say for instance you want to up your Airbnb rental visibility. You want to share it with all of your friends and friends of friends so that when someone’s in town they stay at your rental.
You decide to send a postcard.
Sidebar: I’m trying to keep this somewhat simple. There are a ton of different choices when it comes to sending a mailer. Postcards are normally the best price for a mailer. My personal favorite are the oversized flat pieces, because I think they get noticed the most in peoples mailboxes. What do you think? Comment below.
This is a project you’ve had in mind for a while. So you’ve gathered all of your friends addresses in an excel document.
There are lots of different mail rates: flat, letter, package and then first class, pre-sort, non-profit, etc.
A discount on postage is given if you have more than 250 addresses and choose to send it pre-sort. What this means is that our print shop pre-sorts the mail so that the USPS doesn’t have to do it.
Your mailer contains 269 addresses so you’re pretty pumped at this point because you thought you were going to have to pay .56 cents per piece and we tell you it’s going to be much less. You were also going to have a party to affix postal stamps on these postcards... Now you can just have a party without guilting friends to help.
You have a few ideas on your Pinterest board for the design and send them our way with your mailer list.
We design the postcard to your liking.
You approve the proof.
And the rest we handle.
Mailer Tips:
Order extras. It’s wayyyy more efficient from a money and green wise stance to order extras in the first run. I’d always suggest 5-10% extra. They are a great handout especially for walk up folks or people you forgot to add to your list.
Upgrade your paper. You’re sending something in the mail and you want it to stand out. Do a thicker stock. Who likes to hold something flimsy? (If you do, I am not judging. Research just shows that people equate value to paper stock that is thicker.)
We can handle any size mailers. Shoot us an email today and we can start working on yours. thankyou@swiftprinting.com
