With so many online companies offering an array of real estate marketing products and services, there are a few important things that each Realtor should think about before placing an order for real estate postcards.
- What will be the size of your real estate farming postcards? The choices are: EDDM (
Every Door Direct Mail) compliant postcards sizes from 6.5”x 8.5” to 8.5”x11.5”, 4×6 regular postcards or 6×8 jumbo size ones.
- How many farming postcards are you planning to print?
- What will be your delivery method: EDDM, manual distribution, 1st class mailing or mail house?
- Are you going to use pre-made postcard templates in case of Just Sold postcards or design a custom card with your own message?
- If you have your own unique real estate farming postcards ideas will you need any help with design?
1. With EDDM (Every Door Direct Mail) compliant real estate postcards many marketers go with the largest size allowed because mailing cost is the same for all sizes. To offset the printing cost they include a few coupon ads from their local partner businesses. Some businesses have pre-designed ads with ready-to-print files available and some have nothing. This is where you may want to hire a designer for creating a professional looking real estate marketing postcards that you will not be ashamed to distribute.
2. In most of the cases, it doesn’t make any sense to print less than 1000 postcards for several reasons.
The price difference for printing 250, 500 or 1000 full-color marketing postcards is very minimal. Prices for up to 1000 postcards reflect for most printers only the time spent on setting up and processing your order.
Considering a 2% response rate, sending out less than 1000 postcards may not bring any results at all.
3. Many agents print large quantities of postcards and distribute them using mailing and hand-delivery throughout the year if the content is not time–sensitive, of course.
Some of the printing companies provide mailing services for an additional fee. They usually require your mailing addresses in one of the most common formats like CSV or Tab-delimited text to be submitted to their mailing department for processing. This processing fee is charged for setting up a mail merge.
If your cards are glossy on both sides the addresses will be printed with solvent-based inks on a special printer. Laser printers or regular inkjet printer can’t print on glossy or semi-glossy postcards. Even if you are going to order your farming postcards on matte paper, always request a paper sample from the printing company to test if you can print on it using your printer.
4. Pre-made postcards templates are perfect for Just Listed or Just Sold postcards, for example. For other standard occasions, most of the printing companies provide enough templates to choose from. The only time when Real Estate agents will really need custom design is when they advertise a special or unique event like a community garage sale or if you are planning to use EDDM cards.
5. To hire a designer you need to choose your printing company first in order to have an idea about the printing cost for the size of the cards you’d like to print. Once the company is chosen, place an ad on one of the websites like elance.com or fiverr.com. Many of the designers on fiverr.com are surprisingly good, fast and not expensive – $5 for the basic project is the standard starting price. You just need to provide them with the specifications from the printing company that you chose along with some samples of the postcards that you like and what exactly should be written on both sides of the card.
Online companies for printing, designing and distributing real estate farming postcards:
printplace.com
the best overall printing and mailing company for your farming postcards, business cards and other marketing products
Services and products:
EDDM (Every Door Direct Mail), postcards, business cards, brochures, mailing service
PrintingForLess.com
Services and products:
EDDM, custom postcards design online, real estate business cards, mailing service
PsPrint.com
Services and products:
custom postcards design online, real estate business cards