Direct Mail Pieces

Direct mail is printed material that arrives in your mailbox sent from a business in bulk. It is often referred to as ‘snail mail’ or ‘terrestrial mail’. Direct mail may or may not have been requested by the recipient. Additionally, if it was requested, it often is requested indirectly. (E.g., you have deliberately or in-deliberately joined a companies mailing list, or you have had a sales transaction with the company that has provided them with you mailing address.)

Direct mail is a concentrated form of visual promotion. By it’s virtue, direct mail needs to demonstrate efficient, effective, and often clever design to quickly – even immediately – communicate the message from the business who sent it.

Purpose

The message for every direct piece can ultimately be summed up by nearly all accounts with this statement: Buy this.

Whether the goal of the message it to buy something financially (Eat this pizza.) or ideologically (Vote for this person.), all commercial messages have a clear purpose. The message should reflect and execute this purpose, by effective verbal and visual means. The message should be crafted with careful consideration by the business to properly promote their goods or services. The message should be carefully crafted by the copywriters, photographers, and graphic designers with a keen awareness of both that company, and it’s audience.

Audience

The receiver or, the recipient of this mail piece has to be known and understood by the sender (the company, or its advertising firm) and the graphic designer. Appropriate and relevant copy-writing, visual messages, and design need be used to make the direct mail piece worth the cost to make, print, and send. Some clear questions need to be asked. Their answers will dictate many decisions graphic designers need to make.

How old is the recipient?
What gender is the recipient?
Where does recipient live? (What is the recipient’s environment?)
What is the recipient’s lifestyle? (Are they: married, have children, own a car, own a house, affluent? Do they live in an urban or rural area?)

In-Class

Take example mail pieces and deduct the target audience for the mailing. What criteria do you base your deductions?

Read: Snail Mail Leaves It’s Shell

Consider: Direct Mail Statistics in the United Kingdom

Postal Regulations & Standards

In order for the United States Postal Service to use it’s automated machinery to process and sort the mass quantities of mail it handles daily, there are specific guidelines concerning where artwork can be placed, as not to interfere with automation.

Post Office Guidelines & Basic Standards
• Postal Addressing & Return Addressing Standards

• Elements on the Face of a Mailpiece

• Envelope Layout Guide (Wausau Papers)

For more, read: USPS Resources

Templates and Resources

For practical reasons and standards set by the Postal Service, it is expensive to print and distribute custom sizes and shapes of mail pieces. As found above, incompatible designs can either cause expensive customization and handling at the Post Office, or at worst, cause your mail piece to never be delivered.

Many easy and practical design templates and resources can be found at The Designers Toolbox. There, you can download InDesign files to use as a starting point for this project.

Note: The Designers Toolbox does not offer a folded postcard format required for Direct Mail Piece Assignment. The template files used from The Designers Toolbox will need to be modified. (See the Standard Paper Foldings Page for more.)

GRPH381-Assignment1.pdf