What to Do After You Mail

It's a great feeling when your printer or fulfillment center calls to let you know that your promotion is hot off the presses and entering the mail stream. To make your mailing a true success, be sure that these four items are on your to-do list. 1. Prepare for fulfillment You will need to have a plan of action in place for dealing with the responses to your mailing. Ideally this plan should be prepared before the mailing drops. Whether you've offered a coupon, a free gift in the mail, a digital product trial or asked prospective customers to simply raise their hands and show interest in your product, you need to be ready to follow-up on each response. If you are anticipating a high-volume of response, or need to mail follow-up packages, you may want to consider hiring a professional fulfillment vendor to handle this step. 2. Save samples of the mailing It's important to have samples of your mailing to refer back to. You never know when you'll need to re-use a piece of copy or creative, or refer back to a past job to get a new printing quote. Save both a hard copy and a digital file for each printed piece. Also note how much the project cost, how many copies were printed, the type of paper used, and who worked on the design or copywriting. 3. Clean-up mailing lists If you've paid to mail at a first-class rate or have requested return service along with your bulk-mail postage, then make that added cost pay for itself. When you receive returned mail pieces, set up a method to purge those bad addresses from your mailing list. If you have an e-mail address or telephone number for past customers, try updating their addresses before taking them off of the mailing file completely. Prepare a telephone script or a an e-mail form letter to send out that says, "We'd like to stay in touch with you - Please update your mailing information." This will help to save on future postage and let customers know you care. 4. Crunch numbers Hopefully after your mailing drops you are in a busy state of success, fulfilling orders, handling increased traffic or making follow-up sales calls. During this time, don't forget to record any known response for each piece of mail sent out. A simple spreadsheet can help track how many people responded, how many sales were made and what the return on investment for the mailing is. This data is integral in shaping your goals and budget for future marketing promotions.