Make sure that’s what they do.
Mailing is like any other business sector, you specialise in what you know.
You wouldn’t get a plumber to fix your car, so why get some else to conduct your mailing.
We often hear of printers doing mailings, we, as a mailing house wouldn’t do brochure printing in house.
What’s your mailing houses’ specialisation?
Again, even within the mailing industry everyone has their area’s of expertise be it poly wrapping, data bureau, envelope fulfilment, hybrid mail or response handling.
All mailing houses will do a certain element of each but generally have a specialist area that they can do efficiently e.g. we, at Herald Chase, are geared to do letter printing and paper fulfilment, as per this video of our fulfilment machines:
We do polywrapping but only have about 10% the capacity we have for envelope fulfilment. We do however have the capacity to print and fulfil up to 100,000 items per day.
Experience and references
You must ask for reference letters, as per this testimonial we recently received from a client:
It is essential that you know that the mailing house you partner with are able to complete the work in a timely fashion and do exactly what is requested of them.
Deliverability
No mailing house will deliver the mail themselves, all will use a third party. We partner with the Royal Mail and don’t use DSA’s. Again, this is due to experience, reliability and ease of doing business. We are happy to talk through our experiences with DSA’s and the Royal mail.
N.B. DSA stands for Down Stream Access and are third party companies who sort and handle mail, in the UK the Royal Mail still to the final door to door delivery
Plant seeds
When supplying data, include your own address, your colleague’s addresses and any addresses that you could ask to monitor the quality of your mailings and to give you notification when it’s delivered. In the industry these are called seeds, so ensure you plant a seed
Pro-activeness
Ask your mailing house for examples of how pro-active they are, from suggestions on the mailing packs to analysing responses, this will help with targeting ‘more fruitful’ sectors to give you a higher return on investment on your mailing campaign
It’s more than just a mailing
It’s all about relationships and how everyone gets on, about building confidence, understanding our client’s requirements and the demands that are put on them; and going the extra mile to help them, ensure your mailing house does the same.
The right size
It is not one size fits all, smaller mailing houses tend to be more flexible, amicable to schedule changes and friendly. Your mailing house doesn’t have to be the size of ICI, as long as they have the equipment to run your campaign in a cost effective and efficient manner.
Equally, the larger mailing houses will have software departments and help directly pull in data from automatic and transactional sources, be able to and only want the larger mailings of 500,000 plus, but have to be more regimented and as a consequence may be less flexible.
We hope the above helps a little in you selecting the right mailing house, good luck with your campaigns.
Thanks for taking the time to read this piece on Mailing Houses. If you need any further info or would like to talk to us about your mailing campaigns, feel free to contact us on our office number: 01189 474 888 or alternatively, email us at enquiries@heraldchase.com
