Don't Be Cheap When Sending Mailers

In this episode, Erik talks about a recent mistake that he made in deciding to send out over 300 mailers himself. His mail list was made up of numerous past and present business and personal contacts. First, he obtained a quote for a third party company to print and mail the letters. It was going to cost about $700 for them to print and send the letters, and about another $200 for postage. That seemed high to Erik so he decided to do it himself. He had done these types of mailings before but never for this quantity.

It took Erik an entire day just to do the mail merge online and print out the 300+ letters. Then it took him roughly another day to print out the envelopes. The envelopes kept getting jammed, they would print out crooked, some would smear and he would have to print them again, and he could only fit about 10 envelopes into the printer at once so he had to keep refeeding the printer. It was a nightmare. That wasn't even the worst part. About three-quarters of the way into printing the envelopes he realized he was stacking the envelopes in the reverse order that he had printed the letters, which meant he had to manually re-stack the envelopes one by one. To add insult to injury, he ran out of stamps and had to go buy more at the post office. The whole ordeal took about three days to complete. That's three days he could have used to focus on building up the business.

Erik considers himself a frugal guy and he loves to save money wherever he can. He saved hundreds of dollars by doing this himself but he feels he could have made better use of those three days. He doesn’t regret doing it as he did get a few leads out of it, but he vows never to do another large mailing like this himself. Next time he will definitely hire out, and he will likely order postcards instead of letters since they are cheaper to mail.

It's really important to save money wherever you can but it's equally as important to know when to hire out. Some jobs are better left to others.

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Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. He started his first company when he was just 23, and is the Founder & CMO of Array Digital. Kevin is also the co-host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the co-organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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For more information on the show, and to check out past episodes, go to journeyto100million.com!