Getting your mail to its intended recipients is an important element of a successful direct mail campaign. If you have names in your mailing list, you want to make sure that they are accurately associated with each address. And you want to make sure that each address itself is correct. Otherwise, you may be spending money to mail to people you don’t really intend to mail to.

We’ve heard from customers who have a list and want to mail to the particular addresses in the list, but are not confident about the accuracy of the recipients’ names. We’ve also heard from customers who want to mail to particular people regardless of where they currently live. Or sometimes customers want to mail to their whole business neighborhood. Click2Mail makes it easy to effectively mail in any of these situations by:

  • Standardizing addresses for you – When you mail through Click2Mail.com, we automatically standardize addresses you enter in the Address Book or upload in a mailing list. (And that means you get postage rates that are discounted from what you would pay if your addresses weren’t standardized.)
  • Automatically updating your addresses – We automatically run your addresses against the National Change of Address (NCOA) database and update any addresses where the recipient has moved and filed a change of address form with the USPS. That makes it more likely your mail will get to its intended recipient.
  • Making Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) easy – If you’re looking to mail to every address within your business neighborhood, regardless of the name associated with the address, EDDM might be your best option. Unlike when you use a mailing list, EDDM mailers do not have individual addresses, but are assigned to specific carrier routes and addressed to “Postal Customer”. Because EDDM is easy for the USPS to deliver (they don’t have to sort) it is very cost effective and can be a great option when you want to mail to everyone within a particular business neighborhood.

Personalizing the mailer when you’re not mailing to a particular person

At Click2Mail we’ve long talked about the fact that personalized mail is smart mail. Personalizing mail is a great way to grab recipients’ attention and encourage them to act on your offer. There are many ways companies personalize their mail, including addressing the customer by name, sending out personalized letters on special days (like birthdays and customer anniversaries), and including images specific to the customer’s preferences (like images of products similar to the ones they last purchased). When you have a list of names, addresses, and personal information (like birthdays, purchase history, or other preferences), personalization can be a great way to maximize the return on your mail investment.

But personalization is not always practical. If you don’t have a mailing list with names you’re confident in – if you want to mail to particular addresses regardless of who occupies those addresses, or to whole carrier routes – then direct personalization might not make sense. Yet you can still infuse elements of personalization into your mailers to grab prospects’ attention. For example:

  • Instead of addressing special event postcards to “Current Resident” the local library addressed their mailers with “Friend of the Willamont Library.”
  • A local high school sent out a sports fundraiser to every household in surrounding neighborhoods. The postcard pictured a family wearing the school’s sports team t-shirts. While the postcards did not address the recipients by name, the school did a great job adding a “personalized” touch to their mailer.
  • A political campaign group wanted to reach supporters on a personal level while staying within a tight budget. They addressed their mailers “Supporter of John Doe” and included a picture of the candidate in the local town square.

So if you don’t have a mailing list you’re confident about, or you’re not sure of the current addressee’s name, with Click2Mail you can still send mail easily and cost-effectively because we run the change of address and standardization for you. And, with a little creativity, you can still infuse elements of personalization into your mailer to make it stand out in the mailbox.

Do you have a direct mail question you’ve been wondering about? Share it with us and we’ll answer it in the next newsletter. Or simply contact our friendly customer support staff for help right away. Contact us by phone at 866-665-2787, online at Click2Mail.com, or visit us at https://click2mail.com/contact-us-support.