The volume, complexity, and length of your survey will affect the amount of time required to print and mail survey materials. In printing questionnaires that require optical mark recognition, data capture barcodes, or pre-slugging for precise scanning and tracking, even small errors can be significant, particularly in time. Purchasing supplies will also impact this stage. The mail survey timeline may be affected by delays caused by unusual supply orders, such as a large order of non-standard sized envelopes or a large order of stamps of a specific design. Meanwhile, in organizing survey materials, time is also needed to overprint, fold, insert, address, and stamp the envelopes.
Tip 1: Provide Vendors with a Detailed Timeline
Provide each vendor with a detailed timeline in advance to know that they are dealing with a project under a strict schedule. Make sure to get the vendor’s commitment before placing the order.
Tip 2: Preprint Outgoing Envelopes
Avoid manual return addressing and stamping envelopes when you can. Preprint the envelopes with the logo, return address, and indicia (which substitutes for postage).
Tip 3: Use Window envelopes
Use of window envelopes to save time in matching the mailing envelope by using a cover letter with an address block instead.
Tip 4: Plan for delays
As they say, prevention is better than cure. The most common delays can come from misprints or damages, post office requirements, vendor delays, and holidays. Make sure you don’t make these mistakes and increase your mail survey timeline.
Tip 5: Have Extra Mail Survey Materials
Ordering extra material is sensible in case of misprints or damage, particularly if you need to meet a specific quantity or your target response rates are lower than expected. Moreover, printing a little extra at a higher volume will reduce the overall unit rate. So, in other words, the unit rate for printing 50 extra forms if you are already printing a quantity of 5000, will be significantly lower than if you just printed those 50 forms by themselves.
Tip 6: Take Note of the Difference Between Calendar Days, Mail days, and Business days.
The exact number of days is vital when materials are ordered near the mailing date, and mailings are intentionally spaced. It is also important to take into account holidays, if applicable.
Tip 7: Print Everything in Advance.
Another useful tip is to print materials for all waves during the initial print run. Items like letterhead can be produced with color initially. Then for the mailing, you would just overprint the black text address block or variable details, which is much quicker and cheaper than printing the color elements at the time of each mailing. By printing everything in advance, you don’t have to wait on the base materials to print again for subsequent waves, and unit pricing is less when printing higher quantities.
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Please visit the Link below for the first part of this series
How to Manage Your Mail Survey Timeline When in a Rush: #1 Design the Mail Survey Materials
And keep an eye on our latest blog posts for Part 3: Distributing and Collecting the Surveys
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