News

back

Adding a Personal Touch to Your Mailing

Now let me say from the get-go, I haven’t actually used this, but I am intrigued and may at some point in the future. As we all know, the biggest challenge in direct mail is getting our letters opened and read.

The problem naturally is, who has time (or the hand strength) to manually address all those envelopes. (Especially if you’re someone like me who never quite got the message about gripping the golf club too tightly and now can’t seem to write a complete sentence.)

Well, whenever there’s a need, sooner or later there’s a service that pops up. As profiled in the July issue of Deliver Magazine (itself a clever effort by the US Postal Service to get us to mail more stuff) there’s a new service from Think Ink Marketing. They’ll hand address standard No 10 white envelopes, apply a proprietary stamp similar to a 44-cent stamp and bar code the envelopes for maximum postage discounts.

Most interestingly…they claim a response rate from their mailings of up to 9% (that’s huge).
Naturally, in order to get that type of response you need more than just a hand addressed envelope. The offer, the tone of the letter and the mailing list are all crucial. But it would be interesting to do a split test and see how much hand-addressed envelopes kick up response. What do you think?

There have been a lot of studies that show that hand-addressed envelopes get opened at a dramatically higher rate than those we crank out on our printer.

Posted by Mark Satterfield in Sales Cover Letter on July 9th, 2009.