Most companies with significant direct mail campaigns work hard to minimize their direct mail costs.   Not surprisingly, there are a lot of different secrets to producing high-quality direct mail cost-effectively.

One of the most effective ways to cut your direct mail production costs is to do your planning on an annual basis rather than bidding each job separately.  This reduces production costs in two ways:

  • Gang printing: While every solicitation is going to be different, it is likely that some components (such as envelopes and return envelopes) will be the same for each of your mailings.  Since printing 1 million envelopes at a time is significantly less expensive than printing 200,000 envelopes five times over the year, annual planning can save you real money.
  • Contract pricing: Like most service providers, printers will quote a reduced rate if they know they can count on work throughout the year.

In order to determine how much a company could save by planning annually, we asked for a series of bids for two companies.  First, we asked for one-off bids to produce each of a company’s mailings throughout the year.  Then we asked the same printers to quote on doing the mailings for the entire year.  Here are the results:

In addition to the average production cost savings of 10% that you can expect to achieve through annual planning, you can follow the same process to reap savings from your mail shop too.  Other advantages to annual planning include:

  • Your production manager, your printer(s), and your mail shop(s) will partner with you throughout the year to make sure you meet your objectives
  • By committing to commingle a larger number of pieces during the coming year, you can lock in a lower postal rate per piece with postal logistics experts like our sister company, MailSmart Logistics

If you’d like to learn more about useful cost-savings techniques, please download our new eBook, Cutting Your Direct Mail Production Costs to the Bone:

Expert direct mail production management that saves you time and money —
you’re going to love working with PMG Direct!