Never really done much advertising but competition is increasing at both stores so need to be ahead of the new openings.
I have a few questions on mailers.
For those of you that do eddm mailing yourself. Did you find it cheaper to go through someone like mailshark to have your postcard printed, or have someone local make them for you.
Is EDDM worth doing on your own, or just going through a company that handles the mailings
Of these mailings what is considered a good return rate? I searched the archives and numbers are all over the board.
Q1. (A)I use Mailwise solutions for printing and mailing.
Q2. (A)I would not want to travel to all the post offices in my mailing area.
Q3. (A)Between 2% and 4% return is what I usually see.
Time is money too! If you have the time then doing as much as you can on your own will save you money. Using a service like Mail Shark will cost more but you do not have to think about it at all, drive to post office(s), etc. You pay more, but they get results.
I use a service to do my menus (they outsource the printing) and they bundle my drops. It is worth it to me to spend 0.01 per piece to have them prepare them and all I have to do is go to PO and drop off and pay. If your area PO’s are super busy and crowded all the time then maybe this is a waste of precious time.
So really at the end of the day it is all about YOUR time and how much it is worth. You make more money when you can transition from working IN your shop to working ON your shop though.
I have a full service print shop do all my mailers. I don’t touch a thing
Costs me .255 per house on 10k pieces total cost no other fees or tax. For full color 6x11 inch piece. I was going to do Eddm but it’s to much work for the small savings
One of the reasons to do business with me is that I am a local business… It makes no sense to me to go out of town for printing and mailing while I talk on the radio about local business in my advertising. I guess my local shop probably costs me an extra $100 for a $2000 project. Worth every penny.
We do eddm ourselves we design our own menus (lucky me my husband is a web designer and designs all our marketing stuff) we print them with gotprint.com and they are local enough where I can go pick them up myself. I have my guys in the shop bundle the menus during down time we weigh them out so its done pretty fast. I only have 2 post offices in my area so its not difficult for me to take a drop to the post office or sometimes i just send one of my drivers after lunch time is over. I have all the routes in my area in a spreadsheet and i just rotate them. Its really not that hard to do them yourself if you have a system. We get a really good response from them. If you have a good marketing piece people hold on to it. We mail out our menus.
The question about who is cheaper, depends upon which form of EDDM you are referring to. There are two options for EDDM: First is EDDM Retail & second is EDDM BMEU (Business Mail Entry Unit).
EDDM Retail is the method that you do it yourself where any vendor such as Mail Shark will simply provide you with the printed material. Most also offer the bundling and paperwork that is required as well then they deliver that print material to your location. Once Received, you are responsible for delivering the mail to each individual post office in charge of the carrier routes you are targeting. Upon delivery to the post office, you will pay the postage of 18.3/each (this is the latest rate as of 5/31/15). So with this method, the question of what is cheaper is simply a matter of what you are paying for the print material and your time to process/ deliver each bundle.
EDDM BMEU (Business Mail Entry Unit) is the method where companies will deliver the mail for you through a Business Mail Entry Unit via the EDDM method instead of having physical addresses on the mailers. In this case, you can simply compare the price from a company like Mail Shark for your total cost per piece designed, printed and mailed, to any other company that is offering you this full service option of doing all of the work for you where you never have to touch the pieces.
However, Mail Shark does not utilize the EDDM BMEU method when we mail pieces for our clients. We offer what we refer to as full service mailings, where the major difference is that we put physical addresses on each piece. We feel this is a better mouse trap with a bit more accountability. This method also offers more flexibility to remove certain types of addresses such as Drop Addresses, etc. as compared to EDDM, where you must mail all physical addresses whether you want to or not. So you can compare EDDM BMEU to Mail Shark’s full service options, but it’s important to understand the difference with how the mail is actually processed.
I think a lot of the confusion lies in the fact many companies use the word EDDM but don’t necessarily explain or differentiate what exactly it is, and/or that there are other options out there.
I hope that adds a little transparency to your question.