Batching vs. Mailing – Why You Need to Know the Difference
You’ll hear the terms “batching” and “mailings” when discussing direct mail marketing campaigns. These two terms are different, but they can work together once you understand what they mean.
Batching and Mailings
A mailing is the number of mailers you want to send out in a marketing campaign. For instance, a three-mailer campaign means you’ll send out three mailers to each person on your list.
Batching means you are breaking up a list into bite-size segments. For instance, if you have 4000 people on your prospect list. You send out 1000 mailers per week for four weeks. It’s still just a one-mailer, but you have four separate batches.
This process makes more sense when you work with larger numbers since this is when batching is applicable. For example, you may have 10,000 names on your list. You don’t want to send out a mailing to everyone on the same day or you will be overwhelmed with calls and may not be able to give enough attention to each incoming lead.
To spread things out, you decide to create four batches, each with 2,500 addresses. You can send out one batch per week to spread out responses. You don’t want all the calls coming in the first of the month and nothing happening the rest of the time. It makes the call volume steady and consistent.
How Batching and Mailings Work Together
Batching and mailings can work together to make your marketing more effective. You can set the frequency of mailers as well as the number of batches that you want. For example you can have a 5 mailer campaign with each mailer having 4 batches. That would look like this…
Mailer 1 batch 1, Mailer 1 batch 2, Mailer 1 batch 3, Mailer 1 batch 4…Then
Mailer 2 batch 1, Mailer 2 batch 2, Mailer 2 batch 3, Mailer 2 batch 4… and so on through 5.
Besides spacing out your responses, batching is also good for tracking. Maybe you have a better response rate at the end or the middle of the month rather than at the beginning. Batching can help you determine the best times of the month to mail, and best days of the week to have your mail hit.
We provide mailing and batching services for your marketing campaigns. We have a minimum for batches, which is 1000 for postcards and 200 for letters and flyers. Each batch must meet the minimum rather than the total for mailings. For example, if you have 200 leads and you are sending letters, you couldn’t send two batches of 100. It would need to be at least 200 for each.
Contact us to find out how we can enhance your mailing campaign with batching.
