Marketing definition of yellow letters
Yellow letters are a widely heralded marketing technique that boasts a 10-15% response rate. The premise is to handwrite a letter in red ink on yellow paper offering to buy or sell a product or service. Since this technique uses invitation-style envelopes and live stamps, most recipients will open and read it rather than identify it as spam for disposal. Also, since the letter is handwritten and personalized for them, it helps to establish rapport.
Materials and Cost Savings
One-time/fixed-cost items include a printer and a word processor such as Microsoft Office or openoffice.org (free download). As long as it supports mail merge, any word processor will work. In addition, we will use a digital scanner. Since we’ll only be using it twice, you might consider borrowing from a neighbor or friend instead of buying your own. You will also need your complete marketing list with name, property address, and mailing address. To create these lists, you can use an online service like listsource.com.
A do-it-yourself campaign can provide significant cost savings compared to many online yellow card services. To give you an idea of the savings, a 1000 letter campaign online can cost $1.40 per letter for a total of $1400. Doing it yourself can be as cheap as $650 for a savings of $750. Please note that I did not price raw materials, so you may be able to overcome this by buying in bulk or finding a better deal. These items can be picked up for prices similar to the following at any office supply store such as Walmart, Staples, and Office Depot.
- Color ink at $25 / 250 letters is $0.10 per letter
- Invitation-style envelopes (4 3/8 x 5 3/4) $8.38 / 100 envelopes en $0.08 per letter
- Yellow Notepads (8 1/2 x 11) $10.88 / 600 sheets en $0.02 per letter
- First class stamps (for return service) are $0.45 per letter
- Total cost per letter is $0.65 + tax
The steps
First, I must say that this is a non-trivial amount of work. If I had to guess, I’d say I’ve put in a solid 30 hours from start to finish to put out my first 700+ card campaign. Now that I’m more experienced with the process, I might cut it in half for a similarly sized campaign. You certainly need to consider the cost-benefit before you start. That said, this is a great option if you’re focused on keeping your marketing costs down, are just starting out, or have a tighter budget. You can multitask while printing and stuffing envelopes while watching TV. Given the savings, there is certainly room to outsource this work to someone looking to make a quick buck. Alternatively, you can use this technique until you have closed a few deals. After that, your time is more important and you may prefer to use an online service.
1. Create a custom font
If you haven’t heard of fiverr.com, prepare to be amazed. The premise of the site is to buy various services for $5. Go to the site and search for “source” and then choose one of the service providers that has a good rating. Here is the workflow:
1) They will send you a template that you must print.
2) The template has a series of boxes for you to provide samples of your handwriting, including AZ, az, and special characters.
3) Once complete, you will need to scan the page and provide them with the resulting image file.
4) They will create your font and return it to you in about a day.
5) When you receive the font, you can install it on your machine by following its instructions. Now you can create and print documents using your handwriting!
A couple of things to keep in mind:
1) Try to introduce some variability into your font by using a less than perfect letter; things like left, right, top, or bottom justifying some characters and varying character sizes.
2) Make sure your font has a consistent slant so any sentence you write flows well.
3) Try a thinner pen, such as a ballpoint pen, and keep it handy so you can mix it up in the future.
4) This pen does not need to be red, as we will introduce the color later.
Bottom line, try not to make your font perfect or you’ll have obvious characteristics of computer generated fonts like comic sans (regular spacing between characters, all characters lined up perfectly, no errors).
2. Creating your Yellow Letter Template
Type, print, and proofread some sample text in your new font. If your source is credible on its own, you can skip step A and proceed to step B. If it seems too synthetic, you can try step 1 again (for an additional $5) applying any observations you have. If not, you will need to complete steps A and B to create your yellow letter template. In either case, your finished product will be something like the following where [XXX] and [YYY] they are automatically populated with data from your marketing spreadsheet.
Dear [XXX],
I am a real estate investor and I am interested in your neighborhood. I see you have a house in [YYYY].
If you are interested in selling, please call me at 555.555.5555. We’ll pay closing costs and…
Kind regards,
Don
A) Create the base for your template
The basis of your template will be a scanned image of a handwritten yellow letter. To do this, I suggest you first create a hard copy of your Yellow Card using your custom font. For the printed letter, be sure to leave space for the salutation (i.e. Dear [XXX] from above) and a full line for the address of the property (i.e. [YYY] from above). You will also need a sheet of yellow pad paper and a sheet of blank printer paper. First place the yellow paper on the table. Next, overlay the printout so that the text matches the lines on the paper. Finally, place the blank piece of paper on top so that you can copy the printed version using your handwriting. The purpose of this step is to match the font closely but introduce additional variability to make the result more readable. You may need to adjust the pages several times to get the resulting copy to match the line spacing of the yellow paper. You may get better results by using a window so that the sunlight allows you to see the lines that make up the yellow paper and the lettering you are copying by hand.
The next step is to scan this document with your scanner and create an image file that you can put as a background in your word processor. The best setting for the scanner is text mode (this preserves contrast by removing dust and other impurities). Also, set the scan dimensions to 8.5″ x 11″ so that the resulting image will fill the space in your word processor and line up perfectly with the lines on the yellow paper.
Open the image in your favorite graphics software and change the font areas from black to red. Finally, paste this image into your word processor and set it to go behind the text.
B) Mail Merge Settings
We have the basis for your Yellow Card. Next, you’ll need to add the greeting and property address placeholder fields so that the mail merge can substitute unique values on each page. To do this, you’ll reference your spreadsheet that contains the name, property address, and mailing addresses of your destination campaign. For example, your greeting will say “Dear [XXX]” where [XXX] is the field that references the specific column in your spreadsheet. Using red text and your font, you can write this text and position it so that it is in the correct position in relation to the background image or other text.
Mail merge is such a broad topic that I suggest you do a quick search to find many online resources (Google and YouTube) for setting up mail merge in Microsoft Word and Openoffice.org. Also, if you are using Openoffice.org and notice strange printing behavior, you should take a look at the solution that is needed if you print an odd number of pages.
3. Refinement
You should now try to print on your yellow paper. Most likely you have alignment issues; these can be addressed in a number of ways:
1) Try adjusting the font size of the blank lines above your text. For example, you will have some blank lines before and after the greeting. Adjust the font size of these lines up or down to scroll the text below.
2) A less demanding method would be to adjust the top margin so that the text area moves up or down.
3) You may need to adjust the spacing between paragraphs or characters to match your work.
4) Remember that the image in step 2A can be adjusted up or down to align it correctly.
5) Lastly, try setting the view (or zoom level) to 100% and then hold your yellow page on the screen to see how close it is.
Make the necessary adjustments and try again. A couple of mistakes if you have an inkjet printer:
1) Do not overfill the paper feeder as the page alignment changes as the number of pages decreases.
2) Raise the rear fence on the paper feed to prevent it from moving when the printer feeds paper.
