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Marketing Monday: My $25 Mistake

Scott CostelloAll, Blog, Featured, Lessons Learned, Marketing 5 Comments

Today’s Marketing Monday is a Lesson Learned all at the same time.  From time to time I’ll use different styles of envelopes for either testing or because I run out of my normal ‘lopes (just made that up LOL) and steal some from my wife.  Her stash is usually full of nice invitation and thank you type stationary she gets from places other then the dollar store or Staples.  You know those stationary stores where it costs $30 for 8 greeting cards and envelopes?

Well about a month ago I ran out of my envelopes and was a bit peeved so I went scrummaging through the closet.  I found a stack of about 60 invitation envelopes that my wife had left over from a shower she had planned for her best friend.  Finder’s Keepers right???

These ‘lopes were oriented such that the flap was on the short edge like shown to the left.   As I was setting up my word template to print the envelope addresses a question came to mind….

“Which direction should I print? Along the long side like I do with normal envelopes or short side with the flap?”

I didn’t think it mattered and I wanted to try and be different so I chose the short side, with the flap.    Printed everything up, stuffed, stamped and sent out.

About 5 days later I got a huge pile of mail back from the post office.  Guess what?  Every single mail piece i sent out came back with the message “Invalid address”.  So I double checked all the address and they were correct, so WTF!?!

Turns out that the post office does not like this addressing format.  Their machines look for the destination address along the long side of the envelope and thus couldn’t read my addresses and kicked them back.  What a waste of about $25!

For anyone who has a question regarding the proper address procedure take a look here…Proper Addressing tips from the post office.

 

 

Scott Costello
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