How To Send Out Your Handyman Newsletter
Let’s get into the meat of using your newsletter. I strongly recommend, as you probably heard me say before, that you use direct mail in order to send your newsletter out. I recommend either using the US Postal Service Click2Mail feature. The service is primarily a self-serve mailing house provided by the US Postal Service in conjunction with a partner that they basically outsource their stuff to.
Here’s how it works. You take your mailing list, you export into some type of Excel spreadsheet or comma separated value or tab separated value, then you upload that entire list of people you want to mail to their web server and it’s at the US Postal Service Click2Mail site.
Once you upload your mailing list, you then upload whatever it is you’re sending out to your mailing list whether that’s a postcard or a single page letter or a newsletter format and you want to do it as a fold-over. You can select a whole variety of different ways to send out messages. I use it a lot with postcards. I’ve also used it to send out a tri-fold newsletter. So you can use it in a variety of ways. But you upload whatever it is that you’re gonna do – you can upload either a Microsoft Word document or you can design it online. Their online design tools are a little bit finnicky sometimes – just something about it doesn’t always work right for me. The uploading of the document works great. You upload your document; you upload your mailing list, and then the service itself will take care of the rest. They will go ahead and put the mailing address on the outside of whatever it is you’re sending, they will go ahead and drop it in the mail with postage on it and then they charge you a flat rate – pretty good rates, fairly cheap. The postage you get a discount on because you’re doing pre-sorted first class mail. So they’ll do that for you. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s cheaper for you to use this than to actually go and if you include the cost of printing it out on your computer and the full price you’re going to pay for postage to the mailing list to get your newsletter out from the US Postal Service Click2Mail site. It’s cheaper to do it that way than to do it in-house.I would not be surprised at all.
The other way to do it is, if you are a not going to use the US Postal Service Click2Mail which is kind of like the self-serve option, you can outsource this whole process to a mailing house. You may not want to do it with five or 10 people on your list, but if you get a big enough mailing list, a mailing house will definitely do it for you. How that would work is you’d bring them your mailing list on a disk or you’d email it to them, and you bring what you want to have included in your newsletter or whatever you’re mailing out to them down to them. They’ll do all the printing; they’ll do all the addressing of them, and they’ll put the postage on. They’ll charge you a fee for doing that. The nice part about this is it’s really hands-off. Once you give them your list, you give them the piece you want to do, they take care of everything else.
Unlike Click2Mail where you’ve actually got to upload your list, you’ve gotta put your newsletter on there and then you’ve gotta click the buttons to merge them all together. The other one is totally hands-off. This one’s a little bit more self-serve, but it’s really easy to use click-to-mail. I would not rule out Click2Mail. I personally use click-to-mail a lot.
I will make a huge note here, please don’t do this yourself. Do not go and print your newsletter out on your printer and sit in front of your television licking stamps and hand-addressing envelopes or whatever you need to do in order to get your newsletter out. It’s so cheap to have someone else do it for you now especially with Click2Mail. Don’t do it yourself. You’re going to do it once or twice and then you’ll never do the newsletter again because it’s so much of a drag, and you’re not going to want to do it. If you do Click2Mail, it’ll be easy, and it will be much better for you. It will be much more effective and you’ll want to do it more.
By the way, you can hire someone. If you don’t want to do the Click2Mail, hire someone else to do it. Hire a high school kid to come in and do that for you.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Learn how to crank up your marketing machine for your handyman business with “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”.
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