"Dale's" mail
If you’ve seen me (John) speak, you know that I refer to your donor “Dale” quite a lot.
Who is Dale? Well… she’s your donor of course.
If you are Dale in Canada, you can get between 30-40 appeals in a pretty busy week. In the USA, that can shoot up to 40-50 appeals a day depending on the time of year.
“Dale” is also my beloved mother in law. She kindly keeps all of the mail that she gets and passes it along to me on a regular basis. And when I get to look at is always fascinating.
For all the conference bravado and agency chest thumping, this is where the rubber hits the road. This is where you can see what everyone is doing. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.
I often tell the same joke as well, that given the opportunity, I would do a 8 hour presentation on envelopes if I could. No one would come… but I’d do it. So - for today - I AM going to focus on just the OE (outer envelopes). I will wade through the rest in the days to come.
Taking a closer look at the stack of mail, even the image above starts to tell you a lot of things - doesn’t it? (BTW - this is from the last few months.)
She was sent:
3 - 8” x 4” envelopes
47 - #10 or 9.5” x 4.125” envelopes
10 - 9” x 6” envelopes
TOTAL: 60 mail packs
58 (of 60) - had some sort of tagline or tagline/image combo on them.
56 (of 60) - used white stock.
46 (of 60) - used a standard indicia.
14 (of 60) - used some sort of enhanced indicia.
13 (of 60) - featured a matching gift.
5 (of 60) - used a CF (closed face or no window) envelope.
2 (of 60) - had no design beyond the logo and return address.
0 (of 60) - looked like a personal piece of mail from one human to another human.
There are a lot of things you can do to make your envelope stand out - and gang - it NEEDS to stand out. if your envelope doesn’t get opened - then that brilliant letter inside will never get seen. Above is (a not exhaustive) list of things to consider when crafting your outer envelope.
And based on my experiences and testing through the years - the 5 things that can have the most immediate impact on an envelopes performance are:
Level of personalization - the most real and personal it is, the more likely it will get opened.
Postage - first class will always beat anything else in testing.
Size - if 90% of mail are going out in #10 envelopes well - obviously ANYTHING other than that will be better.
No window. Windowed envelopes always look like a bill. And who wants to tear open a bill?
Stock. Can you get your hands on anything other than white stock envelopes?