A postal service which has started to become more available in recent months has been “Hybrid Mail”. This is where you upload a letter, or letters via the internet, which are then sent out to people in the post – the end of the process is a letter delivered by the Royal Mail postman/postwoman through your letterbox.
The main reason that this is attractive is because these companies use economies of scale, and advance mail-sorting technologies to be able to print and send things out cheaper than we can ourselves.
We all know how important direct mail is as part of our communication with voters. We also know how time consuming it is – mailmerging, printing, folding, stuffing, sorting into walks and then delivering.
We’re not proposing that you should stop doing this. The vast majority of us just couldn’t afford to send out whole swathes of postage in the mail. But we probably could do some – perhaps to the more difficult to deliver areas, or to get something out at a time that our activists’ time would be better spent on the doorstep.
We’ve been experimenting with a company called DocMail, but other companies are available – just do a “google search” for Hybrid Mail UK and you get four or five competitor companies who do same thing.
We’ve found docmail useful for three purposes:
- member and supporter newsletters
- letters to hard to deliver areas (big houses, rural, no access flats etc)
- important letters that don’t go to that many houses on each street (new voters, 3rd party squeeze)
Sign up now with this link and ALDC earns a tiny bit of free postage! – click here
How much does it cost?
DocMail’s prices are as follows:B&W single side letter: 25p + VAT (30p)
B&W double side 29p + VAT (34.8p)
We think these compare vary favourably with your normal costs:
2nd class small envelope stamp (32p, to which you have to add the cost of paper, envelope, printer ink or toner, and the human time involved in printing/stuffing/delivering!)
Colour is considerably more expensive – but obviously gets you much more impact.
Single side letter: 34p + VAT (40.8p)
Double side: 41p + VAT (49.2p)
An A6 2 sided postcard is 27p + VAT. (32.4p) – not tried this, but interesting campaigning idea!
How does it work?
DocMail needs you to upload two things to produce its letters.
A – Your addresses.
The system verifies your addresses to make sure they match up with the Royal Mail postal database for the cheapest mailsort. We found that the addresses produced by EARS match up perfectly, first time in 99.9% of cases. Where they don’t it’s a simple case of choosing a suggested correction to the address.
EARS produces addresses in a CSV file, Docmail wanted them in an excel file, so there was the usual 2 minute job of changing the file type that we’re all used to in using EARS for anything!
B – Your letter
You can upload your letter in either Word or as a PDF.
Normally you’ll want to do a letter that’s on a “letterhead” background with your picture and a bar chart or similar, so its better to use a PDF.
You need to leave a space for DocMail to put the name and address.
You’ll also want the letter to be personally addressed, so with a bit of experimenting its possible to establish the “Dear Mr and Mrs Smith” as a mailmerge field on the first line.
We found it easier to do the letter upload the letter on its letterhead as the BACKGROUND and then upload a Word Document which has just got the first line on as the TEMPLATE.
You can add yourself to any mailing, which is a good idea, and we would always send a test to yourself first, until you’re familiar with the system. Its worth spending a few x 30p to get this right before spending more money upsetting voters.
We’ve found that this isn’t the fastest form of post ever, it tends to take four or five days – they say they send things out as quickly as possible. You can pay for 1st class or for a specific mailing date, but you need to bear this in mind if trying to hit a specific date (e.g. postal vote send out).
Give it a go AND help ALDC!
We’ve set up as an ‘affinity partner’ of DocMail – so if you register as a customer via the link below, ALDC gets a tiny amount of free postage to use for our own activities – every penny helps as they say!
If you are hoping to give this a try, please help ALDC at no extra costs
Your account number for others to enter in the “Referred by” box is: ZDM004289.
Or sign up now using the following link – click here.
Let us know how you get on, and send us some good examples!