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Archive for July, 2021

Tips and Tricks to Make Your Mail Piece Stand Out

Jul 29

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By Rob Hanks, Mailingsystemstechnology.com

July 29, 2021

Mail is a great way to engage customers and prospects. However, some mail pieces garner more attention from recipients than others, due to a variety of factors.

Talon Mailing & Marketing is a direct mail company located in Long Island New York


No mailer wants their communications ignored. Here’s some ideas to make your mail piece stand out and get noticed:

Use the Sense of Touch

Adding to the feel of a piece is a great way to get the recipient to read your mail. Choose a paper stock that has texture to enhance your design. Try a linen or fiber stock to give your piece a textured feel. If you’re looking for something opaque, try a Glama Natural envelope to allow your inserts to show through and entice your audience. Loop or felt stocks are also an option.

Applying a coating to your mail piece is another way to use touch to your advantage. A textured or smooth dispersion varnish allows you to have a matte feel to portions of the mail piece while being able to put a high gloss coating on areas that you would like to highlight.

Aqueous Soft Touch can add a smooth rich feel to a mail piece. This coating can be used as a flood or as a spot coating. Try placing the soft touch on the cover of a multi-page booklet and leave the inside pages uncoated to create a cost-effective mailer.

Embossing your piece adds another way to engage the sense of touch. Combine it with foil stamping and your piece will stand out from the crowd. Embossing is commonly used on covers of books, high end self-mailers, brochures, annual reports, and pocket folders. This can be a little more expensive and add to the production timeline. Using foil stamping can add color as well as a smooth touch to the piece. Gold and silver are the most common colors used, but other colors are available.

Size Does Matter

Using a non-standard size envelope will get your mail piece to stick out in a stack of mail and draw attention to it. The most common size envelope used is a #10. By using a #14 envelope, which is 5” x 11.5”, you are still within the letter rate of postage but have an additional 7/8” in height and 2” in length, plus that much more real estate to print on. You are using the back of the envelope to print your offer or a message, right? If you are printing your envelope on a flat sheet and then converting, the additional costs are minimal.

When printing a card or brochure, again use a non-standard size. The maximum size of a card is 6.125” x 11.5” and a folded self-mailer is 6” x 10.5”.

Interactive Mail

Interactive mail pieces engage the recipient, drawing them in and giving you an additional opportunity to get your marketing message read. Making your mail piece actionable is easier than you may think. Here are three examples:

1. Die cutting your mail piece can add dimension. Die cut an interesting shape that coincides with your offer. Die cut waves if you are marketing a resort at the beach, or the outline of an automobile if you are a dealership. Create a hole that allows the addressee to see a portion of your artwork inside of a self-mailer or brochure. Try using a Customized MarketMail piece (CMM) in a unique shape. The USPS does have some very specific rules to follow for Customized MarketMail.

2. Repositionable notes are a great way to add action to a mail piece. The notes can be pre-printed with a static message or you can apply blank notes and inkjet a variable message. Place the name of the addressee along with a specific offer on the repositionable note and be sure to have a call to action someplace on the mail piece.

3. Include QR Codes or Personalized URLs (PURLs) to take the addressee to your website to see a special offer specific to them. Be sure to have instructions stating to scan the QR Code.

Think Inside the Box

One option that is not utilized as much as it should be is mailing out a package. Design a mail piece that can be mailed as a lightweight parcel. By designing a box that contains your offer, a thumb drive, or small item that pertains to your event, there is a larger chance that it will be opened. People enjoy opening packages and seeing the contents. Use game pieces, plastic chips with your message, or a toy to get your message across.



Need help with your marketing or direct mail?   To learn more about our services, or discuss your direct mail needs, here’s our home-page link and contact information:


Talon Services Include: Direct Mail Services, Long Island New York, Personalized Letters, Laser personalization, NCOA services, mailing lists, mailing list cleanup, Address Correction, Merge Purge, Duplicate Eliminations, Mailing Services, Presort, Direct Marketing data processing, Postage Savings


Achieving Direct Mail ROI With an Integrated Marketing Approach

Jul 7

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By Sherry Chiger, Chiefmarketer.com

July 7, 2021

In a morass of emails, digital ads and social media, a personalized mail piece really stands out.

Talon Mailing & Marketing is a full service direct mail marketing provider located in Deer Park, New York


When companies fail to achieve a return on their investment in direct mail marketing, they tend to blame the channel. Some go so far as to declare direct mail obsolete in the digital age. But according to Maureen Powers, President of Direct Marketing for marketing solutions provider RR Donnelley, the problem often lies in companies’ failure to properly integrate direct mail into their overall strategy.

“The biggest mistake companies make is focusing on what channel works,” Powers says. Rather, “they should focus on what mix of channels works. We’re an online/offline integrated world now.”

With postage rates increasing annually—and with rumors that another USPS rate hike could come this summer—it might be tempting to give up on direct mail. Yet there’s evidence that because it isn’t digital, direct mail makes a significant impact—especially on millennial consumers. According to the USPS, two-thirds of millennials use marketing mail “as a prompt to go online,” compared with 54 percent of Gen Xers and 42 percent of baby boomers. And while 27 percent of baby boomers and 28 percent of Gen Xers regularly buy products featured in direct mail, 40 percent of millennials do.

“Younger people like the feel, the touch, the physical engagement of mail,” Powers says, “and they’re not used to it as much.” In a morass of emails, digital ads and social media, a mail piece is a novelty that can really stand out—particularly if it’s personalized.

Of course, personalization goes beyond addressing the recipient by name. It entails ensuring that the mail piece’s imagery, messaging and offer speak to the recipient. For a seller of pet insurance, that could mean featuring puppies rather than kittens on postcards to dog owners; for a traffic driver to a store or a showroom, it could mean including a customized map. Mail pieces to prospects might emphasize a brand’s reputation and solid reviews; the version sent to customers could feature the same imagery and display copy but steer recipients to specific product webpages instead.

Data and data analytics are key to achieving this degree of personalization—and therefore key to seeing ROI on direct mail. Data analytics can also help you weed out those who are unlikely to respond to your direct mail efforts. “You want to make sure you are identifying the best audience for your product and service,” Powers says. “Instead of mailing a million people, you might want to mail 500,000, as long as those are the right people.”

Digital marketers are no doubt aware of how granular data analytics can get. They might not know, however, that direct mail is now equally sophisticated. “There’s an opportunity for high variability in our mail,” Powers says. Multiple creative treatments and offers can be tested within one campaign. “Testing is so important to make sure you’re constantly updating your data and getting the most relevant info on who you’re talking to.”

The increased sophistication of data analytics and mail capabilities allows marketers to tweak campaigns in response to results almost immediately. If a January test of three versions of a postcard shows that version C was a big miss with recipients, a marketer can remove that option from the next mailing while still meeting the mail date.

It also encourages marketers to take advantage of the Postal Service’s Mailing Promotions Calendar, something Powers is a proponent of. The USPS offers discounts throughout the year to organizations that implement certain technologies into their mail pieces. For instance, companies can register through the end of August to use AR, VR, video and other emerging technologies in their letters and flats in exchange for a 2 percent postage discount.

Other promotions through the end of 2021 reward use of QR codes and the USPS’s Informed Delivery service. The discounts help mitigate the risks inherent in testing. This testing, in turn, might reveal that a format with a higher cost per piece generates appreciably stronger response, enough not only to justify the expense going forward but also to lift ROI.

To make the most of the USPS promotions discounts, companies need to plan ahead. Then again, Powers says, they should be doing so regardless: “The biggest message we try to express is the importance of treating your marketing budget as an ROI strategy rather than as individual campaigns.”


Need help with your marketing or direct mail?   To learn more about our services, or discuss your direct mail needs, here’s our home-page link and contact information:


Talon Services Include: Direct Mail Services, Long Island New York, Personalized Letters, Laser personalization, NCOA services, mailing lists, mailing list cleanup, Address Correction, Merge Purge, Duplicate Eliminations, Mailing Services, Presort, Direct Marketing data processing, Postage Savings