- [Instructor] Hey what's going on?
This is Seth from the REtipster blog
and in this video, I wanna give you a quick walkthrough
of how to execute a direct mail campaign
with this website you see here called ITI Direct Mail.
ITI Direct Mail, also known as letterprinting.net
is a website that I haven't used for a long time,
I just started using it this past year,
but I found it to be particualarly helpful
when I'm trying to do a direct mail campaign
that requires a mail merge
where every single piece of my mail
has some unique attribute or inserts
like the person's name,
or some particular detail about them, or their property,
or whatever it is I'm trying to offer them.
I know there are other services out there,
like I have used Click2mail a lot in the past,
and they can do this to,
but I thought ITI Direct Mail had a better system
for mail merge campaigns.
That's why I want to show you how it works
through this particular service.
In this case, I am sending out a two page letter
in an envelope.
So, they have a lot of other mail types you can do as well
so you don't have to do this.
This is just what I am using for this example.
So in that case,
I would go up here where it says all products,
and then go down here to Letter Printing Services,
and then Two Sheet Letter,
and just to start off, they've got this price calculator
so you can just kind of tell the system all the specifics
of what kind of mail piece you're sending out,
including the postage you're using,
the kind of paper you're using,
what the font is going to look like on the envelope,
what kind of stamp you're gonna put on there,
just a lot of flexibility.
Flexibility that I haven't really seen
with any other service out there.
I'll just take you through what I'm going to use
for this campaign.
Again, you don't have to do this exact thing,
this is just what I'm doing,
and this has worked well for me,
so you can do with that what you will.
At the top here,
for bleed, I just leave that option as it is,
for the perforation services, I'm not gonna mess with that,
so I'll just say no perforation.
Paper stock,
let's go ahead and stick with the cheapest option.
Paper color, we'll just go with white.
Printing style,
I'm gonna leave both of these just as they are.
Just black and white, with nothing on the back
and only print on the front of each page
and for mail merge, in my case, I am gonna have a mail merge
that affects both pages on each mailings.
I'm gonna pick this item here.
If you had a simpler type of mail, like just a post card
or a one page letter,
you wouldn't necessarily have to pick this option.
For the envelope size,
something I like about this service is that they give you
a number of different types of envelopes you can use
and the one that I use is actually really simple.
It's just a totally enclosed envelope with no window on it.
And personally,
I would think that's the basic type of envelope there is.
But there are some services
that don't even offer that option.
You have to use a window envelope.
So, I'm just gonna go ahead
and stick with this basic envelope with no window in it.
And this next one here, envelope printing style,
this is gonna be nothing fancy here,
just black and white text on the front
and then nothing on the back,
then folding style,
I'm just gonna stick with this standard C fold style.
By the way, if you ever have questions or if you're not sure
what they mean by some of these things,
they got really good explanations on all of these items
if you just click the question mark,
like as you can see this explains what a C fold is
and what a Z fold is
and a half fold, and all of that stuff.
So be sure to click those question marks
if you get stuck at anything.
And then for the postage class, what I'm going to do here
is this option right here.
I'm not a non-profit so I can't do this,
but I can do this one,
and the good thing about this one
is it can save you a lot of money
because the postage is way cheaper
than just going a standard first class stamp.
However, it's also gonna take at least a week longer,
maybe more to get to the recipient.
So that's something you're gonna have to keep in mind
if you have a date or an expiration date
on any of this stuff you're sending out.
Just wanna make sure you've taken to account
the time of that,
and make sure your offer doesn't expire
before it even gets to them.
Just to let you know from my experience,
when I use this option, it has taken about 12 to 14 days
after I place the order for the mail
to actually get to the recipients,
and that's something that
I don't think is necessarily predictable on every case
because it says between seven to 15 days,
but I would say if you give it 15 days,
and just assume it's gonna take the longest amount of time.
That's usually a pretty safe bet,
at least that's what I do anyway.
So, go ahead and click that,
and postage style, this is another really cool thing
they got this real peel and stick stamp,
and it doesn't cost anything extra,
so that's the one that I always use,
and then for cancellation of pre canceled stamps,
what this means is if you choose this option,
it will actually put an ink stamp over the stamp
so that it looks a little more personal
like somebody actually put a stamp on there
and sent to the mail, where if you don't choose this,
there's not gonna have that cancellation stamp on it.
I don't know how big of a difference that really makes.
I don't think I've seen any really noticeable difference
one way or another.
But, that option's available.
So I'm just gonna leave that as no.
And mailing fee,
this only applies when the mailing campaign
is fewer than 500 pieces
and you're using discounted postage,
and this campaign does not fall into that categorics.
I'm doing over 500, so just you understand what that is.
There's not even an option for me here,
that's just stuck like that.
Turn around time is four days,
so that basically means once I place this order,
I should plan on it being a full four business days
before these letters get placed in the mail,
and then it's going to be another seven to 15 business days
until they get to where they're going.
So, that should get you an idea
of the time you need to plan for
as you're estimating any dates you put on
on your mail piece.
You can make it happen sooner than that
if you pay a little bit more money
but, I don't really need that.
I'm just gonna go ahead and plan for a couple more days,
and that should be fine with me.
And then hand written font on the envelope.
This is another really cool thing about ITI Direct Mail,
they've got a lot of different
hand writing font options available.
We go to this page,
we can actually see what each one of these fonts look like.
So if you wanna just get an idea
for which one you want to use.
In the past, I have used number two and number 11
and they both looked exactly like that.
And I don't wanna say it's necessarily foolproof.
I think anybody with a keen eye
can look at it for a few seconds,
and realize, "okay, this person is just trying to make it
look like a hand writing font."
But, even with that said, I think there is something
that hand writing font adds to the equation
that would not be there if you had a regular text.
So I always choose this option,
and you can use this for only the mailing address
and or you can use it for the return address.
So there's a lot of flexibility there as well.
In this case, I never used number 10 before,
so I'm gonna give it a shot in this one
and just see how it turns out.
So let's do that,
we're gonna do number 10 for delivery and return address.
And then PDF proof, what this means is
once you've submitted your order,
and you've uploaded your word document and your excel file,
and everything is in there exactly like it needs to be,
they're gonna send you a PDF
showing exactly what a sample of those letters
are going to look like,
and then you can say, "yup, looks good."
And then go ahead and proceed.
However, if they need to do a second one,
say if there is some mistake you made and you catch it
and have to do it all over again,
then there's a fee,
I think it's 35 bucks or something like that.
I've never had to do that, but just be aware
you get the first one for free,
and then you got to pay for anything beyond that.
If you want, they can even mail you a hard copy of the proof
if for some reason you want that.
I've never seen any need for that,
but that option is there if you want to pay more for it.
And then set up cost, this is free for letters.
So I don't need to do anything there.
And then version one,
this is not something I'm going to mess with.
And then staggering your mail,
this is something, say if you have, 5,000 mail pieces
that you're sending out,
and you're expecting people to respond to you
on the day or the day after they received them,
if you're doing a huge campaign like that,
you may want to stagger it just so that
all those letters aren't hitting other recipients
on the exact same day, and you just get hammered.
I think that's the kind of situation where you may want to
stagger it up a little bit.
However, I don't ever do direct mailing campaigns
that are that big, or at least I haven't in the past.
Usually I'm doing 1,000 ish or less,
and I've also got a voice mail system
that catches all of my calls anyway,
so it doesn't really matter to me if and when people call.
I just want them to get this and then respond to me
when they have time.
So for me, this is a non-issue.
I'm just gonna mail it in one batch.
But if for some reason you're taking calls in real time,
then you may want to stagger it at some point.
And then certificate of mailing,
this is not something I've ever done,
so I'm gonna go ahead and skip that.
And then, this particular job that I'm doing
is going to be 898 mail pieces that are going out.
And once we do that,
it will go ahead and calculate the costs for us
right down there.
And just to give you an idea for what some of these things
will do to the price.
One option for example,
if you don't want ITI to handle your postage, you can say
no postage, and then that will cut the price in half for you
but then it's kind of up to you to figure that out.
Or, for example,
you can have them print the postage on each envelope.
That would bring the cost down a little bit,
kind of a nominal amount if you ask me.
If you did want to have cancellation on every one,
you can have that on there,
and then that would bring the price up.
So if you don't like what that price is,
you can always toggle some of these things
and play around with it, and try to get the price lower
based on what you need.
Something I'll just point out here,
just so you can get an idea of what this actually costs,
when we take this number 536 and 12 cents,
divided by 898 mail pieces,
that costs for each mail piece,
not only the printing, production materials,
and the postage in the mail,
is just under 60 cents a piece.
So I'm just gonna go ahead and just label this job
January campaign, because I'm doing this in January.
And then once you got that, we'll go ahead and say
add to current.
And then once we got this done,
this gives us a nice overview of what we're ordering here
and that we're also getting a pretty big discount
based on the quantity that we're ordering.
Just go ahead and check out.
And if this is your first time ordering
and you don't have an account yet,
you can just go ahead and click on this and create one.
Or if you do have an account,
you can just log in like I'm gonna do right here,
and by the way, this also just outlines those costs again.
And then this information over here just outlines
all the billing info, just make sure that's correct
and you'll have to click on the
I agree with the above terms and conditions,
and go ahead and click continue.
And then this right here says shipping not required.
We will mail your order from Pasadena, California.
And the way this works,
is that they will literally just stamp my envelopes
and drop them right in the mailbox from Pasadena.
And this is one thing just to be aware of
because depending on where your recipients are,
that may determine when they actually receive this mail.
If all my recipients are right there in California,
it's probably not going to take as long
as if all my recipients are in Maine or something like that,
because the distance those letters have to travel
may very well have an effect on how soon they get there.
So, just keep that in mind,
and we can go ahead and click continue,
and then we're gonna go ahead and stick with this option
where they will drop my mail at the post office,
and then you click continue again.
And then you can pay by credit card, paypal, or check,
or money order.
I'm gonna do Paypal for this one.
Click continue.
We'll just look at that.
Make sure all looks good, and click Place Order.
This will take us to the Paypal site here.
Can log in
pay now,
alrighty,
here we go.
So now it takes us here to the ITI website
because we're not done yet.
What we still have to do here
is upload both our word document and excel file
because they're gonna need that information
in order to actually execute what we ordered here.
All we've done so far is just tell them what we want,
but we haven't given them information to do it.
So, what we're gonna do now is go and click on Upload File,
and then we click this,
and we'll click Upload Artwork or Files,
click on this,
my example here, I'm going to upload two different files.
So there's my word document, click on this again
and then we got my excel file right here.
Open that,
and then if you got any specific instructions here,
you can go ahead and list those out,
say for example,
if there was any information in the excel file
that wasn't formatting properly
or if you want your return address to be something specific
or anything like that,
you can just go ahead and specify that here.
Basically what happens here is
once you put your instructions here,
and then you send it in to them,
there's gonna be a person who looks up all the information,
puts the file proof together and sends them to you.
And the nice thing is, if any weird issues come up of that,
like for example, the first time I ever did this,
the person reviewing my order
noticed that I had an expiration date on my offers
that was probably gonna expire
before the letters got to where they were going,
and they just used their common sense and realized,
oh that might be a problem.
And then they called me, explained the issue,
so I say, "okay, go ahead and update that file
"and I'll upload it you."
And actually said, "well, if you want,
"we can just update that for you."
And they did it, and it worked out great.
So, I just thought that kind of service
and attention to detail was really really nice.
It's something I never experienced before from any other
direct mail service.
So in this case,
I'm just gonna specify what my return address should be.
Okay, so what I'm gonna do at this point
is stop this recording and I'm going to pick this up
once the next step of this order is processed.
And the way this usually works is if there are any problems
or issues that they don't really understand
with the instructions or the files that I submitted,
typically what they would do
is they will post a message right here on this screen
and kind of start a thread,
you also get an email notification of that.
So if they have questions, they will let you know.
If it's a really complicated issue,
you might even get a phone call,
and have some kind of a phone conversation.
Usually this back and forth
is kept virtually here on the say.
And once they have all the information they need
and it all makes sense,
they will then send me a PDF proof
so I can take a look at it and verify
that everything looks good.
And once I approve that, they start production
in about four days after that, the letters are completed,
dropped in the mail, and then they go on to the recipients.
So I'm going to stop this recording right now,
and then I'm going to pick this up
as soon as I hear back from them about the next step.
So it actually only took about an hour
and I didn't get any other emails or notifications
about any questions or issues.
They just sent me the proof,
and this is what the email looks like.
So I'm going to go ahead and click on Review Documents,
and it opens this up.
Go ahead and click Continue.
So we can see this, we can scroll down and see the letter,
we can see the purchase agreement,
make sure that all looks right,
and they sort of point out all the errors
where they inserted things.
Then lastly, we can see what the envelope looks like
based on my explanation.
By the way, when you specify your envelope,
you can either do what I did,
or you can just type the instructions
on what you want your return address to be,
or they have a separate envelope word document template
where you can type in exactly how you want it to look
and upload that.
So it will be a third file that you upload,
so either way, it can work.
But this is kind of nice,
because it shows exactly what that hand writing font
is going to look like on this example.
So that's kind of cool, looks nice.
So assuming everything looks good,
all I gotta do is type in your information here,
and sign it digitally, and you are good to go.
Go up here and click on Finish.
So what happens from this point is about four days from now
once that is all finished and ready to go
I'll get an email letting me know that
all the mail is finished and has been dropped in the mail.
And then about seven to 15 days after that
is when those letters should hit each recipient
and of course I listed myself as one of the recipients
on that list,
so I will be fully aware on the day
approximately when everybody's getting them,
because I'll get one too.
So that's pretty much it.
That's how ITI Direct Mail works.
A little bit different
than some of the other services out there,
but I've had pretty good luck with them.
They're not paying me anything for this video,
I'm not an affiliate of theirs, I'm getting no compensation
or anything like that for this video.
I'm just putting this together because
I found it to be really great service
and I think you guys will probably find it helpful too!
So if something looks interesting to you
be sure to check them out.
And I wish you all the best
with your next direct mail campaign.
Thanks for watchin', and I'll see you later!