Direct mail is memorable, tactile, and gets you into the hands of your prospects and members. Effective direct mail design can make your audience notice your products and services or visit your website. Mail is a tool that allows you to entice people into the necessary action and create a smooth member journey. But you also want to be mindful of your budget when creating a piece for mass production. The price of designing your direct mail piece depends on many factors.
Here are a few tips that can help keep your direct mail budget in check while providing a top-notch mail piece.
Avoid Color and Image Overload
The quality of your graphic design is crucial to the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. When someone is sifting through the mail, you want your piece to stand out with a clear message, great branding, and intelligent design.
Using many different colors or adding too many images spikes your printing costs. Focus on using the right colors and the perfect pictures instead of visually overloading your prospect. Use your brand’s colors and include images that represent your organization and its mission. Don’t add any colors or images that create a feeling of excess. Keep the design of your mailer focused on the message. Your members will appreciate the focused appearance, and your budget will be grateful too.
Personalize For Your Audience
Personalization is a powerful tool in direct mail. You can personalize each piece to appeal to the preferences of the audience. You can personalize pieces by including the person’s first name in the greeting. You can also reference other details like how much a donor has given in the past. Use the data you have available for your mailing list and design the mailpiece based on that information.
Personalization helps you save on mass production costs because you know the information sent will speak to the receiver instead of sending random details out blindly.
Thanks to variable data printing (VDP) technology, personalizing each piece doesn’t require any additional investment or extra effort. VDP lets you customize pieces and order smaller patches before committing to a larger production batch. Your members will feel that you tailored the content to meet their needs and will appreciate such care and detail.
Create Mock-Ups
Although direct mail design is typically associated with postcards and flyers, there are dozens of direct mail design choices. Every type of mailer is used for a specific purpose and differs in a marketing budget. Picking the right format can help keep your project cost-effective while sending your message in the best format.
After you design your direct mail piece, you will print it professionally. Creating multiple mock-ups with different mailer sizes is a great way you can save money. The multiple mock-ups allow you to choose the right mailer size before settling on a single option. Explore different formats and determine what works best for your message before printing an abundance of mailers. Viewing samples is one of the best ways to avoid costly printing before you know which design works the best.
Proof Your Work
A necessary best practice is to proof your work before mass printing. If you assume your mailer is perfect without proofing, you run a considerable risk of needing to reprint again, which is very costly. You can easily repair a mistake that’s caught during the proofing process. But if you find the error after production, it could be a disastrous and embarrassing problem for your organization. Proof every word, color, and image. Ask for multiple people to review and edit the mailer. The more eyes on the piece, the better chance you have at catching any flaw before sending the full project into production.
Designing Mass Production Direct Mail with Valtim
Valtim can help your organization with the entire designing process. We will help keep your project on track while keeping an eye on your budget. During the design process, we will recommend ways to help keep your design cost lower so that you can feel financially comfortable when its time to send your project to mass production.
Contact Valtim to get started with designing your next mass production direct mail project.
