So today American Made Home Solutions is offering some great tips for mailings how to get them outsourced, or to get someone else to do them. So many businesses do direct mailings. So whether it’s mailing a letter, a postcard or brochure, flyer, any number of things often times get mailed and in so doing, it’s not necessarily the most efficient use of your time if you’re the one doing it. So there are lots of companies that will do this for you. When it comes to pricing it is broken down by how much of the process they are doing versus you doing. But the ones that are generally more expensive are ones that are kind of all-inclusive. Maybe they design every bit of it for you. You basically give them content and information, and then they design it for you. They submit the designs and then you okay them. They print them and you send them the list. They send them out. Some of them will also scrub the lists for you, this means remove any duplicates or bad addresses. Basically the more services they include, the higher the price. So if price is your concern, that’s not necessarily the way you want to go as far as getting your mailings hired out. But if time is your concern, and you’re doing this as a side thing and you need more time invested by somebody else, then that may be the exact way you need to go.

Other ways that people do it is that’s a one-stop shop. So they may be using printingforless.com, which utilizes the USPS, Every Door Direct or Vista Print. You guys may not have known Vista Print does this, but they do, Next Day Flyers or Gunderson Direct. Postcardmania obviously specializes primarily on postcards and a company called Cactus Mailing that you may not be aware of as one of the best prices for actual brochures, if you’re mailing brochures to folks. These are all-inclusive. 

When you’re starting your business, you want to be able to get mailings out there and businesses oftentimes find they’re most effective when they don’t look like everybody else’s. So if you go to a company that say specializes in say real estate and things, they’re sending the exact same mailer for you, that they are for all their other customers, and that’s how they’re streamlining their end of it. But then all those customers in the exact same areas oftentimes can be getting that same information.  Although some will only allow a certain amount of customers to be of the same kind of business in the same area.  For example, they might only allow 2 real estate investors as clients in the 98223 zip code to help their product stay competitive.

So another way that you can outsource is to get it to a virtual assistant. There’s a couple of different things that you can do. For instance, you can design your own mailers. Yes, you can do them a hundred percent on your own, or you can reach out to Fiverr or Upwork and pay somebody to design, three to five different ones to represent your individual unique campaign. And then once you have them, they’re yours to keep. Then you just submit them to someplace to be printed and, or mailed. If you have them printed somewhere at local printers and they can be less expensive and you can support another that local business. One of the best ways that we were the most cost effective, and creative was when we paid the local neighborhood kids.

So we utilize those local neighborhood kids who wanted to earn some money. They were sitting around at home, they had nothing better to do, and we just paid them per letter or per envelope that they addressed, however it was and in so doing, they worked as hard as they wanted or as much as they wanted and it enabled them to provide and learn, but also just gave us a fun connection to them. Not everybody wants to babysit, right? And most boys, I know don’t want to babysit, but they want to go earn money. And they can’t always do the lawn and different things that other people have. So it’s a great way to help fill a community need.

Another one of the investors that I know, she actually goes to the nursing homes and she hires it out to seniors in the nursing home. They get together for their bingo nights or whatever, and then they just have a night, one night, a week or whatever, when they come together and they address envelopes and things and, and that’s how she does it. And she pays them per piece as well. And then again, it’s a great outreach. It’s an opportunity to be a blessing to someone else. They still earn a little bingo money or whatever at the same time. 

So there are many, many tools and resources. If you hire a VA, what you can do with the VA is the same thing. If you’re paying them hourly, you can have them design it. You can upload the list to them. You can have them scrub those lists. Then you can have them, send them up through those services to have them mailed. So it all can be done virtually. It doesn’t necessarily have to be done in person.So there’s lots of different ways. But please learn from our mistake here at American Made Home Solutions . We did not scrub the list before we sent them out and  it was a 30% return rate because of that, that was a lot of wasted money that could have been saved by a few more minutes of work.  The uniqueness and differentiation definitely made a difference and mailers, it depends on everybody’s area, right? So sometimes if you’re in a more urban area versus a more rural area, you’re going to get a different response rate.  So figure out what works best in your area, what is going to be best in your business and then find a tool to get it done efficiently and effectively.