Divide Your Direct Mail Costs

As a business owner you know the need for advertising, but you feel that you just can't afford to spend the money for a direct mail piece.  A simple solution for that problem is to get together a group of businesses and split the cost of a mailer.  For example, let's say the cost for a local postcard mailing (including postage) is $.28 per card.  For a 10,000 piece mailing, that's $2800.00, which is a lot of money no matter the shape of the economy.  But if you have 7 businesses advertise on the card, then the cost is only $400.00 per business, while still a lot of money, it is much more manageable.

The best scenario is if your business is in a shopping complex and you can have a map on the mail piece for one location to where all your stores are located.  But even if you aren't in a shopping center, you can still send out a mailer.

Now here is the best part, for putting the mailer together, your ad doesn't cost you money.  Now I don't want you to think the card is free for you - just because you won't be laying out cold hard cash there is still an investment on your part for putting everything together.

Here are some tips when putting this type of mailing together:

1.  Give yourself a LOT of time.  Don't be in a rush and make this a last minute project.  You are dealing with disparate personalities and ways of doing business, patience is important.

2.  Have deadlines.  While you will want some leeway with your time, but you also can't keep on pushing a project back because one yahoo is holding you up.  Let all the deadlines be made known up front and have everyone agree to them.

3.  Go with as few businesses that you can.  The fewer the businesses the higher the cost per advertiser, but you get more area on the piece per ad and with less people comes less aggravation.

4.  Use just one graphic artist for the project.  Businesses may have their own graphic artist that they like to use, but too many cooks, well you know the rest.  If they already have a graphic artist, tell them that's great, they can send the artwork over to the project graphic artist.

5.  Allot time for the graphic artist to work on each business.  When you are getting a price from the graphic artist for the project let them know you want them to spend 1 hour (or whatever time they think they will need) for each business.  Some ads will need more work than others, but this way the quality will be the same throughout.

6. Let all your advertisers know up front, that as project manager your price for putting everything together is that your ad runs at no cost.  If you don't do that, you will have some unhappy campers after the fact when they find out.  You are putting a lot of sweat equity in this project and shouldn't have any qualms about letting them know.  If someone objects up front, just politely walk away - they would have been more trouble than they were worth.

Please let me know how this tip works out for you.  Also, visit our website at www.GagePress.com.