How Much Does it Cost to Send One Direct Mail Card? | TheG Show 9

XANT just added automated direct mail to its sales acceleration platform. This is a massive update of the software, which is guaranteed to make life easier for sales reps! To see how this feature compares to the old-fashion way of sending handwritten cards, I ran a little experiment this week. I tried to find out what it costs to send one manual card as a sales rep, versus automated direct mail. And boy, did I get a result!

I’ve always considered myself a note card guy, but truthfully, in the last 5 years I’ve dropped the ball. I thought it was too hard… So, I wanted to pick it back up and see how much it costs to send a few simple thank you notes to customers or prospects. Here’s the breakdown below.

cost of sending one direct mail card -manual vs automated direct mail breadown

How to Send a Thank You Card – The Old Way

Watch the video to go with me on this journey just for a simple thank you card to a prospect! It can pretty much be summed up in a short story:

  1. I went to the store which is 10 minutes away.
  2. Took a few minutes walking around this huge supermarket just to find cards.
  3. I couldn’t decide what card to pick, so I took some time there too.
  4. They wouldn’t allow me to buy just one card, so I had to pick up a pack of 10 (!).
  5. Wasted some time trying to figure out where to get stamps.
  6. I went home, wrote the thank you note, then went back to post the card.

So it was pretty much an adventure, and I have to say during the course of this experiment, I realized a few things:

  • I don’t know proper email etiquette (figures)
  • I already had cards in my office that I bought a year ago and never sent (typical)
  • For a millennial sales rep, sending a handwritten card is like solving a puzzle. Really hard and time-consuming…

After all this, I can see now why i stopped sending handwritten note cards to customers, that was absolutely painful!

The truth is, direct mail can be incredibly effective, if it is part of a well thought-out multi channel marketing campaign. And our “State of Direct Mail” research has proved it beyond doubt! About 65% of leaders say they are likely to respond to direct mail… and yet only 38 percent of companies use it!

The Cost of Sending Manual versus Automated Handwritten Cards

We also had a look at the numbers, the cost of sending a manual card versus sending an automated systems like the XANT platform. The average wage of a sales representative shown by our State of Sales 2017 research  is about $92,000/annually including base and variable income. Broken down, that’s an hourly wage of $46.30 – so we just wasted an hour of a sales rep’s time!

We had a card purchase cost of about $5.73 for, but the entire adventure puts us at a total cost of 52.03$ because of the time cost.

And that’s just for TWO cards!

Sending handwritten cards straight from your CRM with an automated system like the XANT platform, brings us to a total cost of $4.77!

It’s way cheaper to send an automated card in comparison to sending two automated cards versus two manual cards.

You make the call here, but I’m tired just thinking about it…

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