Should We Address and Mail Your Holiday Cards? Split the List First

Most people ask this as one question: do I hand off the mailing or not? It is really two questions, and the right answer is usually yes for part of the list and no for the rest.

Here is what each service does, how to split the list between them, and how to send us a list we can print without a phone call.

What the two services are

Addressing, $75 per 100. You send the list. We print each address on its envelope and the cards come to you with the envelopes already done. You sign, seal, stamp and mail.

Full mailing service, $350 per 100, postage included. We address, stamp, seal and mail the whole order. The cards never come to your desk.

Both are priced per 100, so both grow with the order. At 250 cards, addressing is $187.50 and mailing is $875. The full arithmetic, stamps included, is in What 250 Business Holiday Cards Cost.

The one thing we cannot do

We cannot sign them.

That sounds like a footnote and it is actually the whole decision. A card to your own client, the person who would recognize your handwriting, should carry your signature. A printed name on that card tells them they were on a list. Not that they were thought about. On a list.

So the useful question is not "should we hand this off?" It is "which of these names expect my pen?"

Split the list by who expects a signature

Go down the list once and put every name in one of two piles.

Keep for your pen. Clients you work with directly. Referral partners. Your own staff. Anyone who would notice whose handwriting it is. Order addressing for this pile and you give up nothing. The envelopes arrive finished, and the only job left is the one that matters.

Hand off entirely. The card that comes from the firm rather than from a person. Vendors and suppliers. The landlord and the building manager. The prospect you met once at a conference. The broad list a firm mails because it should be on their desk in December, where the imprint says "from all of us" and nobody is looking for one partner's signature. For this pile the mailing service is the cleaner answer. Your four lines of imprint carry the firm's name, and nobody on your end touches the job again.

Be honest about the first pile. If every name lands in it, nothing on this page saves you the evening, and that is fine. It means you have a client book worth signing for.

If you are splitting one design between the two services, call 833-682-8250 before you order and we will work out the cleanest way to set it up.

How to send us the list

Our list template carries one sentence that matters more than the rest: we will print exactly what you submit. If the list says "Jon," the envelope says "Jon."

A spreadsheet, one column per field:

• Company
• First name
• Last name
• Address line 1
• Address line 2, for the suite, floor or attention line
• City
• State, two letters
• ZIP code

Three habits keep it clean.

Write to the line lengths. The template allows 30 characters for a company name or a street line and 18 for a city. A line that runs long is a line somebody has to shorten, and you would rather that be you.

Do not abbreviate unless you want the abbreviation. "Ste" prints as "Ste." "Suite" prints as "Suite."

Leave the comma off after the city. It goes in for you.

And one habit that has nothing to do with formatting: read the list before you send it. Every year somebody's card goes to a client who retired, sold the practice, or passed away in the spring. Ten minutes with the list prevents the worst card you will ever mail.

The list is the slow part

The printing is rarely what holds up a mailing. The list is. It lives in three places, the CRM, somebody's contacts and a spreadsheet from two years ago, and pulling it into one clean file takes longer than anyone budgets.

Start there. If the list is ready on the day you order, the rest of the calendar takes care of itself. The dates to work back from are in The Thanksgiving Card Deadline, and the same logic runs backward from December.

The short version

Sign the cards that need your signature. Hand off the ones that do not. Send a list that says exactly what you want printed, because that is exactly what we will print.