by Tim Speweik: Direct mail is still alive and doing well in today’s multimedia marketing world! Engagement has grown every year with the decrease of first class mail. But just like any other marketing tool, your church plant postcard design needs to be good or it can have a low response rate. Or even leave a negative impression.

Direct mail always works best when tied in with other forms of marketing, creating an awareness campaign. Here are some key points for successful church plant postcard design:

Who Are You Trying to Reach?

Knowing who you’re trying to reach helps determine the language and direction of your design. Your postcards will get delivered to the churched (and the unhappy at church), but the target has to be the unchurched. Be sure not use church lingo. Tailor language that is aimed at the unchurched – what will speak to them? This should include a personal invite to your church. Let them know you want them…

The post Increase Your Response Rates with These Church Plant Postcard Design Secrets appeared first on Church Planting Tactics.

Source: Increase Your Response Rates with These Church Plant Postcard Design Secrets

The post Increase Your Response Rates with These Church Plant Postcard Design Secrets appeared first on Passion for Planting.

The following is a guest post by Holly Goff, production manager at d2design, which specializes in direct mail solutions tailored to churches and their goals.

Chances are, you’re planning to use direct mail at some point in your church’s marketing plan. It’s cost-effective and maintains great response rates:

Once again, direct mail response rates rank stronger than digital channels, sometimes exponentially: at 5.1% for house lists and 2.9% for prospect lists, mail response rates consistently exceed the 2% response rate of all digital channels combined.” – IWCO Direct

The fact is, a significant percentage of millennials like mail. It has a built-in emotional response factor. Gallup reported that 36% of people under the age of 30 look forward to checking their mailboxes every day. What’s more, 95% of 18-to-29-year-olds have a positive response to receiving personal cards and letters.” – Forbes

But while direct mail is relatively inexpensive for anyone, churches can file online for USPS nonprofit pricing and lower postage costs even more.

Church Nonprofit Authorization Number

A nonprofit authorization number (NPA) allows an organization to send standard bulk mail (a large quantity of identical pieces, such as a direct mail postcard) at a lower postage price. NPA numbers are FREE, applied for through the post office, and kept on file in a national USPS database. But while useful, it’s sometimes hard to get consistent information about these numbers even at the post office, depending on the branch’s size or the particular clerk you encounter.

Most importantly, an NPA number is NOT the same as a tax ID or a bulk mail permit number. An NPA number proves that your organization is a nonprofit entity and can mail at a lower postage rate. (Note that if you’re mailing on your own, you’ll also need a bulk mail permit, for which you’ll pay an annual fee. However, marketing firms such as d2design typically use their own bulk permit number for your mailings.)

Established Churches: How to Find Your Church’s NPA

If you are an established church that might have done mailings in years past, you may or may not have an NPA number. It depends on whether any of your predecessors applied for one. Call the post office to check. If you are a brand new church plant, you don’t automatically have an NPA number.

Verify Your Information on File

If your post office confirms that you do have an NPA number, verify the church name and address associated with it. This is important because the name and return address on your postcard MUST match exactly what’s on file with the post office.

For example, did you brand yourself as “XYZ Church” in your community, but your legal corporate name is “XYZ Church of the Presumptuous Assumption”? The post office will only use your church’s full legal name as it appears on your Articles of Incorporation that you submit to them.

If you’ve changed your church’s name, you’ll need to complete a 6015 form to update the national nonprofit database, even if you’ve already told the rest of the USPS about your name change.

A Warning

Church plants sometimes try to use their sending church’s NPA number. This works sometimes, but it’s risky. First, your card’s return address will be the other church’s information. And let’s say your sending church is in Wisconsin, planting your new church in Arizona. That’s confusing.

Second, this discrepancy could cause your cards to be rejected. That’s money down the drain to reprint thousands of postcards. And since your cards are time sensitive, you may not have enough time for the reprint, so you risk missing the window of opportunity altogether.

Get your own number to use when you need it.

Church Plants: Now You Can File Online for Your Church NPA

If you’ve determined that you need an NPA number, file your application and expect to receive it back in 2 to 6 weeks. You can take a completed hard copy of the 3624 application form to your local post office or file online for USPS nonprofit pricing by taking the following steps:

Register for a free Business Customer Gateway account
Once you’re registered and logged in, select Mailing Services from the left nav bar
Select Postal Wizard
Select 3624 under Complete Customer Service Forms
Complete the application

You just saved a trip to the post office!

More on Church Plant Postal Permits

How Much Money CAN Church Plant Postal Permits Save You?
How to save $450 by not applying for a bulk mail permit but still getting all the benefits
If you’re going old school, Which USPS paper forms to file, plus filing tips

The post How to Get a Church Nonprofit Authorization Number and Save Thousands appeared first on Church Planting Tactics.

Source: How to Get a Church Nonprofit Authorization Number and Save Thousands

The post How to Get a Church Nonprofit Authorization Number and Save Thousands appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by Patrick Bradley: If you’re sending out direct mail to announce the launch of your weekly services, save $450 and don’t open a church bulk mail permit (but still get all the benefits using this secret).

There are two permits required to get the lowest postage rate for your church plant’s mailing:

the church bulk mail permit
the nonprofit pricing classification

Any business or organization can open their own bulk mail permit (account), but it costs $225 to apply and another $225 each year (find current pricing here).

The secret trick is that the bulk mail permit doesn’t have to belong to you.

Pros of Not Having a Church Bulk Mail Permit

There are several direct mail vendors that specialize in helping churches. They each have their own bulk mail permit, so you just piggyback on theirs. You still need your own nonprofit pricing classification, but they’re already paying their own $225 a year so you don’t have to.

This is a no-brainer. You don’t want to print and prepare your own direct mail anyway. It requires way too much work and industry knowledge that you don’t have time to learn. The only thing the $450 really gets you is your own indicia (keep reading).

Let a vendor that specializes in church mailings do all the work. You’re already $450 ahead if you do, not to mention all the meetings you can have with people because you weren’t spending your ministry time preparing the mailing yourself. You have way more important things to be doing!

Cons of Not Having a Church Bulk Mail Permit

There is only one minor drawback that I’m aware of: the indicia (that non-stamp stamp thingy) has to be the vendor’s.

So instead of:

[your town] permit ##

…it would read:

[vendor’s town] permit ##

If you’re planting in Wisconsin but the vendor is in Hawaii, some recipients might get confused, but probably only the few detail-oriented people who will actually notice.

The good news is that the return address on the cards will be your church’s. In fact, it has to be.

If you can live with using their indicia to save $450, go this route. But remember, you still need to file for own nonprofit pricing classification.

More on Church Plant Postal Permits

How Much Money CAN Church Plant Postal Permits Save You?
How to Get a Church Nonprofit Authorization Number, including how to apply online (coming soon!)
If you’re going old school, Which USPS paper forms to file, plus filing tips

The post How to Save $450 by NOT Getting a Church Bulk Mail Permit appeared first on Church Planting Tactics.

Source: How to Save $450 by NOT Getting a Church Bulk Mail Permit

The post How to Save $450 by NOT Getting a Church Bulk Mail Permit appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by Patrick Bradley: In addition to your community service and word of mouth marketing, you’re thinking about sending out direct mail postcards to your community to announce the Grand Opening of your church plant. You could potentially save thousands of dollars in one mailing with church plant postal permits.

A 1st class postcard stamp costs 35¢ these days (Summer 2018). You do get priority delivery, but if you want to mail 20,000 pieces, you’re looking at a tab of $7,000 just for the postage. Yikes!

Church Plant Postal Permits: Bulk Mail

The US Post Office allows any business or organization to get a bulk mail permit. If you’re mailing more than 200 identical pieces, you get a discounted rate. Their pricing formula defies understanding, but the gist of it is that the more work you do for them (sorting, etc.) the lower the postage price they give you.

If a business hits all of the post office variables right, they can get postage in the 16¢ – 20¢ range! Now 20,000 postcards can cost you as little as $3,200. Woohoo!

There are some trade-offs, though:

One of the factors is mail route ‘saturation’: every box on the carrier’s route must get a card
You don’t get priority delivery: the carrier technically has a 2 week window to deliver the cards (but they usually hit on days 2 and 3)
There’s a $225 application fee and a $225 annual fee, so you’re out $450 in the first year (find out how to save the $450 below)

The Double Discount for Nonprofits

But wait, there’s more! The Post Office offers nonprofits an even lower rate, a sort of double discount. Now if you hit all of their formula just right, your postage can be as low as 8.3¢ each (as of 2018). So mailing to the same 20,000 families now costs only $1,660 in postage. Woah!

Applying for the nonprofit discount is tricky, though, because new churches are in a catch 22: you want the discount to announce your Grand Opening, but the Post Office says you’re not a church until you’ve had your Grand Opening.

Having your 501c3 Determination Letter from the IRS smooths this over, but most brand new churches won’t get that back from the IRS in time.

The USPS came to a compromise, though: “If an IRS exemption letter is not available, a complete financial statement from an independent auditor (such as a CPA) substantiating that the organization is a nonprofit [can be submitted].” Wow, that’s not burdensome to young churches at all.

We’ll deal with all of that in this series:

More on Church Plant Postal Permits

How to save $450 by not applying for a bulk mail permit but still getting all the benefits
How to Get a Church Nonprofit Authorization Number, including how to apply online (coming soon!)
If you’re going old school, Which USPS paper forms to file, plus filing tips

Photo by Ethan Hoover on Unsplash

The post How Much Money CAN Church Plant Postal Permits Save You? appeared first on Church Planting Tactics.

Source: How Much Money CAN Church Plant Postal Permits Save You?

The post How Much Money CAN Church Plant Postal Permits Save You? appeared first on Passion for Planting.