It's kind of amazing when you think about it. Even experienced direct marketers spend weeks of their time fine-tuning the look and message of their pieces, then stuff this finely crafted piece of work into an envelope that seems to scream, "junk mail throw me away!"
In retail marketing, it's long been understood the package a consumer sees has a lot to do with the sale. The right package helps close the sale. Put the product in a dull, lackluster package, and regardless of how good the product may be, there's a good chance the consumer may pass it by. In direct mail marketing, the envelope your piece arrives in is the package. Using it properly can make the difference between the recipient opening it to read your pitch or simply tossing it into the circular file unopened.
It's beyond the scope of this article to tell you how to design the envelope to help your sale. However, we can tell you an important component in the overall design of your direct mail campaign is the judicious use of graphic elements, fonts and color. For some direct mailers, this means the use of dramatic photos, such as starving animals. For many mailers, however, the best balance is somewhere between this extreme and one of a plain, unmarked envelope.
Picking the Right Components
Not surprisingly, when most people think about graphics, they think about spot art, not fonts. Yet, the use of the right font can almost instantly set the tone for your piece at first glance. An informal look can be achieved with a font that looks handwritten, and when you use the right printer, it can even appear that the envelope was addressed with a ballpoint pen, right down to the blue ink.
A font such as Ransom, where the letters appear to be cut out of newspapers and magazines, immediately catches the eye. Use it with a headline on the envelope that says, "We're holding your copy for ransom!" and you have a catchy book or magazine mailpiece.
A formal font, such as one of the many script faces, can provide your envelope with a hand-addressed look. Make sure you balance the size and weight of the font carefully to the envelope size. It's very easy to overwhelm an envelope with a too enthusiastic use of bold or oversize fonts.
Graphics are another eye-catcher. The trick is to balance the use between something that will catch your recipient's eye and one overwhelming graphic that just gets tossed. The main use of graphics, fonts and colors on the envelope should be to get the recipient to open the envelope and read the piece that's enclosed.
Color can also play a big part in making that happen. This is another place where balance is important. Too much color and the envelope screams "junk mail!" Spot color used for emphasis is very often an effective technique. If your printer has color capabilities, you can use it to provide a highlighter-type effect to emphasize a printed headline like, "Time-Sensitive, Open At Once." And, of course, small pieces of clip art, or even photos, are a lot more eye-catching when printed in color.
Finding the Parts
Once you've decided to incorporate fonts, color and graphics onto your envelope, finding the right one to use is moderately easy, especially if you have access to the Internet. First, look to see what you might already have. Many popular office suite programs such as Microsoft and Corel come with a collection of clip art and fonts. You can see what fonts are already installed on your system and what they look like by simply clicking on the pull-down menu in Microsoft Word and many other Windows-based applications. The name of the font is displayed in the actual typeface, which gives you some idea of what it looks like.
Collections of fonts and clip art range from inexpensive to free. If you think you'll need a wide variety of art and fonts for your mailing projects, consider purchasing a collection from IMSI Software or Corel. Both offer huge collections of art and fonts for well under $100. For example, IMSI's MasterClips 500,000+ offers over one-half million pieces of clip for about $80. Corel's Gallery products are just clip art and fonts, while the $99 PrintOffice 2000 has more than 25,000 clip art images, 300 fonts and 10,000 photos. And, at that price, PrintOffice 2000 includes a graphics editor and an image editor for creating complex and custom graphics.
If you have access to the Internet, you might investigate www.arttoday.com, a site run by IMSI Software. For a yearly subscription price of $29, you have access to almost 700,000 pieces of clip art, more than 17,000 photos and almost 2,000 fonts. More expensive yearly subscriptions provide an even greater choice.
And, if you have Web access, lots of free fonts and clip art are yours for the downloading. At www.download.com, you'll find more than 100 fonts, and www.pcfonts.com provides links to lots of other font sites with thousands of fonts available for free download. A similar portal site for clip art sites can be found at www.clipart.com. And for a large selection of downloadable clip art, check out the www.clipartconnection.com Web site.
All of these resources are free or very inexpensive. The downside is that you really need to have some idea of what you are looking for or you can spend an inordinate amount of time browsing.
Fine-tuning Is Important
There are a number of ways to go about using the graphics and fonts you've decided on. The least expensive in terms of investment is to simply go to a short-run printer with your design, and have them run off the number of envelopes you need. Except for a set-up charge, which depending upon the complexity of your design and the printer's labor policies can run anywhere from $20 to several hundred dollars, the only other expense is for the material.
While fairly economical, at least in the short-run, this approach is often not the best one to take. As with the wording of a direct mailpiece, its graphic "look" also very often needs to be fine-tuned to produce the best results. This means that you'll want to perform mailings with two or more designs and tally the returns to determine whether color, font and/or graphic placement affects the response rate. There have been numerous articles and books written on how to perform test mailings, so we won't detail the procedure here.
What is important, however, is that you come up with a technique that lets you create a limited number of different test designs for your mailings without breaking the bank. Submitting several different designs to a short-run printer is one way to go, but with set-up fees, the expense of tweaking a design as the testing proceeds, such as moving the logo a half-inch or changing the color of one of the graphic components, can easily mount up very quickly. Really small test mailings can be printed on a high-quality office inkjet, but with many mailings consisting of thousands or tens of thousands of envelopes of each test design, this approach will be impractical for many mailers.
One approach that's gaining lots of attention is high-volume inkjet-based envelope printers. Some of these printers are priced out of the market for smaller mailers or those who want to do more limited runs. But fortunately, with printer technology improving at such a rapid rate, affordable envelope printers are starting to hit the market. These are perfect for doing small runs of a few thousand pieces at a time. They are also ideal for testing graphic design elements since they can print up to 1,200 dpi resolution in black or color literally anywhere on the envelope face.
Dye or pigment-based ink cartridges let you print on a variety of different envelope surfaces. The pigment-based black ink cartridges produce the deepest blacks. These printers are able to handle envelopes and postcards ranging from as small as 31/2" x 31/2" to as large as 91/2" x 121/2" and as thick as 4/100". A useful option is an extended output conveyer to make certain the ink dries before the envelopes are stacked.
These printers have input hoppers that can accommodate 250 #10 envelopes or 500 postcards. And with a maximum print speed of 1,200 #10 envelopes an hour, you can create a 10,000-piece test mailing in under a day.
Even if you don't need to perform test mailings on envelope designs, or once you've decided on a design, these new printers are a great idea. Priced at under $3,000, these specialty graphic envelope printers allow you to easily incorporate graphic elements to dress up your piece, as well as conduct testing to determine their actual effectiveness. If you can jump your return on a mailing by even as much as a 1⁄4%, that's a small price to pay. Another place these specialized printers are perfect is with general, everyday mailings that are too time-consuming and cumbersome to individually type or feed through an office laser or inkjet printer. And while printing labels from your mailing lists and sticking them onto envelopes is fast, printing professional-looking fonts directly onto envelopes looks far better. These printers can even attach to your computer network so that anyone in the office can send 10, 100 or 1,000 envelopes at a time for their own mailings.
Mark Strobel is vice president of Marketing for Primera Technology, Inc., which is located at Two Carlson Parkway North, Plymouth, MN, 55447-4446. Information can be obtained by calling 800-797-2772 or visiting www.primeratechnology.com.
