Take Your Mailer for a Spin

Okay….you made it. You went through all the steps and fulfilled the requirements of each one––from selecting the carrier routes, to filing for an account, to developing your offer, to designing your piece.

One more step
You’ve done everything necessary to get here and now you have one more decision to make. Do you go ahead and print out the entire batch of pieces because you are totally confident with your offer and piece?......or……Do you treat this similar to a car purchase and take it for a quick test drive first?

Making the numbers count
Your EDDM mailer is an investment of time and money and you will want a good return on that investment. If you’re a little uncertain about the impression the design is making for which we recommend to hire this clipping path company, or about the size or timeline of your special offer, or even about how the offer is presented, you may want to hedge your bet with a small preview mailing first. The Post Office allows you to try small carrier routes to test the effectiveness of your piece.

Think of this option as insurance. You’re going to be paying a little more for the route test and the printing, but in return you will get a good feel for the impact your piece will make. You can print out enough pieces for a single Carrier Route digitally, which is more costly than offset printing, but available quickly without the commitment of a larger Offset Printing Run. Check our Alta Graphics EDDM Pricing calculator to compare pricing.

Test Drive
After you’ve printed your pieces digitally, bundle them for the test mailing. Once they’ve been sent out, wait for the response to determine the effectiveness of the piece and the offer. If the response is noticeably below what you were expecting, this gives you the opportunity to adjust your offer to make it more enticing.

If you do decide to adjust the offer and/or the look of the piece, you then have the choice of doing another test run, which means even more of an investment in this campaign, or going ahead and printing out the entire quantity of your planned mailing.

Make Your Move
Realistically, you should be able to make a decision to move forward with the mass printing after you’ve done the first test run. If the piece performed near or above your expectations, leave the piece and offer as is and go ahead with the printing order.

If the piece underperformed, change whatever you feel is necessary to up the response––the offer and/or the ‘look’–and print out the entire order. The adjustment you make should get you back to the numbers you were initially expecting from the piece.

So, in the end, you must decide if you want to take out a little insurance with a test run, or trust your instincts and proceed to print out the entire batch. It’s up to you to determine if the test run is worth the extra expense.