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Direct Mail Marketing

I currently work at a dealership but am in the process of starting my own direct mail marketing service. I've spoken to management and owners at a few dealers I already have a relationship with and have gotten some good advice from them but I'm curious on a larger scale who here still uses direct mail to market to there customers? What do you typically pay per piece including postage? Is there a reason you use that company or would you be willing to switch for one reason or another such as better pricing?
 
We still do direct mail. Not on a monthly basis, but every few months we send out a few thousand on behalf of our clients.
We used to use third party companies, but they were charging around $3 a letter including the postage and we can do it in-house for $0.90 a letter including the postage. We passed the savings onto the client and doubled down into quality papers, etc when they were willing to spend more.

The key things when working with a company for direct mail (from our perspective):
1. How much do they charge to clean lists?
2. How fast can they go from receiving the files to hitting mailboxes?
3. Do they offer design services or are we supplying the designs?
4. Do they openly offer up the pricing for AdMail vs Regular mail with the benefits of each? (might be a Canada Post thing)
5. Do they have options for labelling the envelopes?
6. Do they have consistent enough pricing that I can resell without requiring a quote each time?

Other small issues, but after working with 6 different printers and 2 different direct mail companies, I've come to realize where the pain points are, what costs me more money and what information tends to show experience in doing what we need done.

For us though, turnaround time is king.
 
I am doing direct mail marketing for quite some time now and I am getting assistance from Troi Mailing Services in Ontario. I've got few categories according to which I send out periodic mails, and the interval also varies at times. Yes, the cost will be more than in-house but for me giving it to third party is also profitable. If you are trying to start your own make sure you have better designs and personalizing the mails will be a better idea.