DIY vs. Professional Printing: Pros and Cons for Direct Mail Postcards

You are currently viewing DIY vs. Professional Printing: Pros and Cons for Direct Mail Postcards

Even though marketing is always changing, direct mail postcard marketing still works. But as a company, you must ask, Should you hire someone to make your postcards or do it yourself? Because printing at home and by a professional both have different perks. And it can impact your business/brand/startup likewise.

It is therefore very important to choose the option that fits your marketing goals, timeline, budget, and skills. So, we’ll see that each choice has pros and cons in this guide. 

The Pros of DIY Printing

a074f8a1 5d1c 4508 bad5 8bb31607cb69

Discounts and control over the design are two benefits of doing your own printing.

You can save money and time by doing it yourself instead of going to a print shop. There are ways to make your own direct mail, like you can gain marketing ideas for small business, if you know how to create it and have a good printer.

However, DIY printing has these two primary benefits:

1. Cheaper Upfront

Without design and printing fees, you can minimize upfront expenditures per piece significantly. Printing requires only paper, ink, and delivery. Savings pile up when sending many letters.

2. Entire Design Control

You can design without telling the artist. Change pictures, colors, layouts, and text until it works. Full control over mailer appearance and message.

Since it’s affordable and offers more design options, DIY printing is intriguing. So, knowing how to produce and print direct mail can save you money. 

DIY Printing Cons

Making your own direct mail postcards has drawbacks:

Invest Time

Direct mail design, printing, and production take time, especially for larger projects. You manage printers and tools. This is a side gig to running your business.

Insufficient printing experience

Direct mail is what professional printers do daily. They can swiftly and cheaply create high-quality things with the correct tools, skills, and buying power. All stages must be repeated to learn them. The outcome may be rough.

Quality Control

Expert printers have quality control systems to ensure consistency and accuracy. Doing it yourself increases color shifts, bleeds, and smudges. If the finished pieces look amateurish, action rates may plummet.

Pros of Professionally Printing Direct Mail Postcards

Printer pros have skills that most people don’t have. These printing experts know a lot about different kinds of paper, inks, presses, ways to finish prints, and more. Because of this, they can often make better direct mail than the average person could at home.

A professional printer might be able to offer high-quality paper and more advanced printing methods that meet marketing needs, such as metal stamping, embossing, spot UV, and more. 

Their press can make more at once and faster without lowering the quality. And the main thing is, professional printing is best for projects with 50,000 or more pieces, where doing it yourself isn’t possible.

Professionals also make sure that designs work best with different printing methods. They tell you how to make your pieces shine. With our production and design skills, your direct mail will look its best.

You can advise them to print in a variety of sizes, so they can make and send millions of postcards at once. You can also make their infrastructure bigger if you make your effort bigger. There would quickly be limits on how much you could print and mail yourself.

Cons of Professional Printing

There may be problems with using professional printing services.

Higher Cost

Professional printers charge more per page than printers you can use at home. You need to think about design fees, setup fees, and higher unit prices. These are mostly for sending out smaller letters. 

Print shops can offer better prices on bigger orders because of economies of scale. And their costs are high for runs under 5,000.

Less Customization

Professional printers may limit the ways you can change things. 

Most print shops have models and charge extra for printing data that can be changed. It can be hard and expensive to split-test products or go after multiple micro-segments. 

You can make each piece unique by printing them yourself.

Getting Targets And Data – Which Way Is Best?

How well direct mail postcards work depends on how good the sending list is and how personal the postcards are. 

When you print things yourself, you can only use basic mail that can’t be changed in any way. The mail lists, demographic information, and personalization that professional printers have are better.

If you hire a good and professional service, they can help you send direct mail postcards only to streets and neighborhoods where your target customers live. 

Putting demographic data on top of each other lets you filter by age, income, family status, and hobbies. In this way, less mail is sent to people who don’t respond.

Personalization is also important. When you use a professional printer, you can make sure that your messages, deals, and designs are just right for each group of customers. 

This could be affected by their past purchases, their age, their gender, their hobbies, or other things. 

Response rates go up a lot when you send personalized postcards through direct mail.

Professional printing gives you more advanced ways to find lists and divide them up than do it yourself printing. They make it easier to customize direct mail postcards for each receiver. It makes ad targeting better and raises ROI.

So, all in all, it’s your choice based on product type and how smoothly it’s presented. If your product seems a little more expensive then hiring a professional service isn’t a waste. But if your aim is to aware people of products in bulk, that are cheap too, go with the DIY printing option.

  • Post published:December 30, 2023
  • Post author:
  • Post category:Tips

Leave a Reply