Costs

This section draws together the various costs involved in a solo mailing and considers the ways in which savings can be made.  Hamilton House always suggests that customers start by doing a small mailing to test response rates before committing to the cost of a large mailing.

Overall costs

Discounts

Savings

Overall costs

When you do a mailing you will pay for a variety of services.  Here are some typical prices per envelope:

From this we can see that around 45% of the cost of a promotion is going to be postage.  What this price range shows is that while it can be true to say that saving even 1p on your envelope costs can be a help, it is not much help overall – because of the domination of postage in the equation.   This doesn’t mean that you should just spend anything on the other areas, but it does raise the point about making sure that you are not saving 1p here or there and spoiling the whole effect of the mailing.   The postage remains the same price whether you use a totally out of date mailing list or an up to date one.

A similar situation arises with regards to the copywriting and design of your leaflet.  Many people like to save money by writing a leaflet themselves – but this is a false economy if the result is poor.   The postage and all other costs are still paid whether you send out a great leaflet or an awful one.

For this reason testing is essential.  Do not feel you must mail everyone at once – even if it saves you money on the postage discount.  Get the response rate sorted first.  If you are looking for a response rate of 3%, do a test mailing of 200.  If you are looking for 2% mail 350.  For 1% mail 500.  But if all you need is one half of one percent you will need to mail 1000 to see if you are on the right track.

Discounts

All areas of direct mail are open to discounts. 

With postage, discounts are usually fixed and known in advance – and with Royal Mail this has to be the case.   You can cut the cost of postage by posting more, sorting the mail, and opting for the slower service

With labels, many list suppliers will offer you discounts for bulk purchases.   It is possible to find very low prices by shopping around – but invariable this leads to a decline in quality.  Always check what the guarantee is.   For business lists you should be looking for a guarantee that says 98% of the mail is deliverable, and that a refund of several times the cost of each address is given on all returns, if the list is less than 98% deliverable.

Envelopes are discounted by volume – but also do remember that quality issues will apply – the quality of paper and polythene can be tremendously variable.  We have seen situations in which customers supply their own envelopes or polythene for us to do a mailing, only to have ourselves return it to them on the grounds we cannot use it because the quality is so poor.

Savings

Although the best savings come from mailing larger volumes, we always suggest that customers should start with tiny volumes in order to ensure that they get the response rate they want.

Every month we have clients who are thrilled to have far exceeded the response rate they require, and clients who are angry at the poverty of their response rates.   Those who do particularly well, usually have the following factors in common:

• They have tested their mailing before they start
• They have not tried to make significant savings through the labels or envelopes they supply
• They have used a professional copywriter and designer.

These factors all add to their costs at first – but then, because they have the response rate sorted they do get their savings by buying in bulk from that point on.

Contact Information

Hamilton House Mailings plc

Telephone: 01536 399 000

FAX: 01536 399 012

Postal address: Hamilton House Mailings plc, Earlstrees Ct, Earlstrees Rd , Northants NN17 4HH

Hamilton House Mailings plc is a company registered in England and Wales with company number 2444392.