Week 11: Mothers Day Campaign
With the 1st campaign completed and a deadline fast approaching I wasn't about to take any chances when it came to campaign no 2. After my love hate relationship with the envelope I decided to scrap the whole thing and go for a postcard strategy. Again me being me, I wanted it to be different and I wanted it to; you guessed it…...stand out! Needed to put that thinking cap on and realised Mother’s Day was round the corner so why not use this as my caption to break the ice then bigno…..tell them all about this brilliant business and how we can help. I am not a graphic designer so with a bit of a steep learning curve I eventually got there with the help of Canva. No she is not a person as it sounds like one of those foreign names of a lovely friend you once knew who used to rescue you everytime you found yourself in digital deep waters . As I’m a bit of a late bloomer, I only just discovered this wonderful tool. For those of you who like me are totally oblivious to the latest craze then:
…...CANVA is a graphics design platform that allows users to create social media graphics, presentations, posters and other visual content. It is available on web and mobile, and integrates millions of images, fonts, templates and illustrations…..wikipedia.
Docmail
I was then able to choose any images, select my captions, enter the text then, walah….a star is born (I mean my postcard). This time no, signing or hand writing each name/address was all done via this tool. Just a quick lick of the stamp (well not really as its got glue on the reverse but you know what I mean) and off to the post box. Job Done! Postcards came in at just under £25 and the stamps at £70 bringing the grand total to a whopping £95 but remember you have to run one of these every 6 weeks then like everything else it just adds to your overall budget. Although, it was better than my 1st attempt i.e, (letters) i’m still not convinced as there must be a way to stream line this further without having to pay £100 odd quid.
The answer was docmail. I came across this great product through one of my lovely mentors who in his weekly zoom calls was kind enough to share with me the features of this great product as part of the standard Q&A session. Here, I learned for as little as 50p one can get their chosen piece of marketing designed, configured, and mailed out direct to each contact for less than a 2nd class stamp. This was a major breakthrough as your marketing is an ongoing task one needed to find a method which was both price and time friendly. This ticked both boxes by allowing me to set my marketing on autopilot which in turn led me to work in other areas (better use of my time). Plus a bonus of meeting my deadline of getting these out in time for Mother’s Day.
All this sounds amazing right? wrong! A task which I believed would be a straightforward process like always seems to find a way to challenge me. An assumption of a couple of hours took an (almost) entire day. We finished designing the postcard in canva but were having problems uploading it onto Docmail as they wouldn’t accept a pdf at first then customer services advised us that we needed to export the file as a png/jpeg which we did and that didn’t work either. After a few sodding attempts it spontaneously decided to accept pdf so why would customer service say otherwise? I have come to the conclusion that most customer service departments are pretty useless so why do I bother with them!!!…. I don’t know! Once docmail accepted our file it started doing all kinds of other nasties like putting their address on top of my artwork and the bit where you write the recipients addresses in the centre especially when we specified the right hand side.
Basically, round two of another soding sort was on the horizon. You’d imagine one would become an expert ‘sorter’ by the end of this task. Lastly, the list of addresses which was supposed to be a simple inclusion yet Docmail was hellbound to decline every 3rd address as ‘inaccurate” but how is this possible as I got these directly from the gov.uk official website? (did I mention I hate the council too). Another tedious task of checking two thirds of the postcodes individually via the Royal Mail website and three quarters of an hour later it finally accepted; Woohoo. On a positive note, I would like to say I have absolutely nailed it (with Docmail), as everything that could've gone wrong, did so! Now my next campaign will be 100% smooth sailing. You just gotta ride the wave and try your best not to smash the laptop in a fit of rage. Good luck.