What you need to know about bulk mail postage

Postage can easily eat up a large part of the budget for any direct mail campaign, so it’s worth exploring every available opportunity to keep these costs down.

One option to consider if you’re looking to engage with a large audience as efficiently as possible is bulk mail postage.

What is bulk mail postage?

Bulk mail postage refers to the mailing of high volumes of items all at once in order to secure discounted rates for delivery.

It’s often a good tactic for businesses that want to engage with a large audience through mass-produced, standardised marketing materials. This can extend far beyond simple mailshots.

You can use bulk mailing to distribute items such as leaflets, brochures, magazines, postcards and catalogues, for example. In addition to its high levels of cost efficiency, bulk postage offers plenty of potential to experiment with different formats and strategies for engaging with your customer base.

How does bulk mail postage work?

One of the most important things to remember when thinking about distributing mail in bulk is that there are minimum limits on the number of items you can send.

In order to qualify for bulk mail discounts, you need to send at least 4,000 standard letter tariff items or 1,000 large letter tariff items.

Another key part of the bulk mailing process is pre-sorting, which could be facilitated by a mailing house. This helps to drive efficiency and ensures you can secure the discounts you want by processing and grouping your mailings together before passing them onto the delivery provider.

We can also offer support when it comes to data cleansing, which can prove particularly beneficial when distributing mail in bulk. Sending to a large mailing list raises the likelihood of duplicates and other issues, such as invalid postcodes. Taking the time to analyse and improve your data can keep these problems to a minimum.

Costs and discounts: how much does bulk mail postage cost?

The answer to this question depends on a wide range of factors, including:

The number of pieces you’re sending
The type of materials you’re mailing (heavier items like brochures and catalogues will cost more than postcards or leaflets, for example)
Your design and printing choices
How much emphasis you’re placing on data segmentation and personalisation
What mailing class you decide to go with

We can say with confidence that the amount you spend on bulk mail postage often makes up at least half the overall cost of your direct mail campaign.

With that in mind, it’s important to manage outlay by taking advantage of any bulk mail discounts available to you. A mailing house partner like The Mailing People can help you keep your costs down and secure any savings you might be eligible for, such as Mailmark discounts.

How to get started with bulk mailing

If this is your first venture into the world of bulk mailing, you might have some questions about the steps involved in the process.

Here are some useful starting points:

Be clear in your goals and target audience: Like any approach to marketing, a bulk mailing campaign needs clear goals to ensure you can make well-informed decisions and measure returns. Your target audience should also be clearly defined to allow easier mailing list segmentation.
Clean up your mailing list: Before delivering any mail, you should feel confident that all of the addresses and data on your mailing list are accurate and up-to-date.
Look into mailing house services: Working with a mailing house partner can make your life easier by taking some of the work involved in bulk mail postage – such as pre-sorting – off your hands. It can also put you in a better position to reduce postage costs via your partner’s established supplier relationships.
Consider starting small: You might want to test out the effectiveness of particular marketing materials in smaller campaigns before expanding them to a bulk mailout.

Best practices for a successful bulk mailing campaign

You can increase the chances of your bulk mailing campaigns delivering results by sticking to common direct marketing best practices.

Include a clear CTA: A compelling call-to-action – such as encouraging readers to visit a page on your website or call a number to secure a limited-time offer – can prove even more effective when distributed to a large audience.
Use attractive visuals: Aesthetic elements such as colours, images and iconography play a huge role in the initial impact of your marketing and how well it’s remembered.
Personalise wherever possible: Adding a level of personalisation to bulk mailing campaigns, such as addressing recipients by name and tailoring special offers by region, can increase their impact and drive results.
Integrate with other channels: Direct mail campaigns shouldn’t exist in isolation. Boosting and supporting them via other channels like email, social media and your website helps to fuel engagement and encourages responses.

Common mistakes to avoid

All your hard work can be undone by easily avoidable mistakes, so take care to avoid pitfalls such as:

Not segmenting your audience, which can lead to irrelevant and poorly targeted mailouts, harming your brand.
Being too busy or cluttered in your design, raising the risk of recipients ignoring or discarding your item.
Using obviously generic, ‘one-size-fits-all’ marketing copy.
Not tracking responses or engagement with your campaign, meaning you have no way to gauge its success.
Failing to validate your mailing list and sending to out-of-date, inaccurate or duplicate addresses.