Direct Mail Tactics - Sequential Mailings and Use of Addresses

[Miles Stanley]

Hello all!

I'm formulating my direct mail campaign and i had 2 questions about the mailers themselves.

1. (maybe a dumb question but not sure...)  do i need to state the address of the specific property i am mailing the owner about or keep it general like "If you have any properties you are wanting to sell..." knowing that they have the property i am after?  FYI the list i am mailing to is targeted.  My gut says to spell out the specific property address, but a lot of online printing services (Costco for example) don't give you the options of merging a mailing list with the mailer to create tailored postcards and letters for each owner on the list.  The ones that do are much more expensive.  Costco lets you upload your design and print them, but that's about it.  i can create them myself with a little extra legwork, but I'm trying to outsource these types of things and stay focused.
   1. side note, does anyone have referrals to online services that can do the tailored mailers at a reasonable price?  I have seen yellowletters.com, but haven't delved deeply into it yet...just saw that their unit price per mailer is much more than other services.
2. i plan to mail to 1/4 of the entire list every week and plan to hit the entire list every month or about 6-8 months.  Is there any distinct advantage to using a sequential mailing (i.e. the Month-1 postcards looks like/says this, the month-2 cards say that, the third month is a letter, etc) or can i send the same mailer every time?

Just trying to get this right going in so i don't waste money.  Hopefully the answers aren't all "it depends on your market".

Thanks