Most of our customers begin their direct mail projects by saying something like, “We want to mail 5,000 letters in envelopes with a remit card. Here are the designed print files. We’d like to get it in the mail by next week. Please get the printing started.”

It all sounds great. I always ask them when we are going to get the mailing list and usually it’s, “We are still working on the list. We’ll get it to you as soon as we can. We have more names to add or take off.”

We are very focused on customer service, so we get the printing started so it will be done on time.

Then the mailing list comes. Let’s say the list is 4,700 records. We run it through our mailing software and there are 800 duplicate addresses and 200 addresses that have problems. We go through the bad addresses, correcting what we can and perhaps we correct 100 of the bad addresses.

Now the 4700 has been reduced by 500 to 4200. But we’ve already printed 5,000, because that’s what we were told.

It would have been much better for this customer to work on their list FIRST, as part of the initial stage of the project. If they had sent it to us before sending the print files, they would have known how many they were really working with, how many they needed to print or they could have added more names and addresses to the list and used their print and mail budget to the maximum.

I would encourage anyone who wants to do a direct mail project to WORK ON THEIR LIST FIRST! It will save time and money in the long run and result in a much smoother project.

If you have a mailing list you would like us to analyze for problems or have an upcoming direct mail project, please feel free to call us at 818 386-8667 or email bob@colortrend.net.

Happy mailing!