The 4 Week Promotional Mailer Challenge: Week 4

Welcome to the fourth and final week of the zero2illo Promotional Mailer Challenge.

Following on from last week, it’s now time to crack on with creating the final artwork for your mailer (unless you’re using one of your existing Illustration).

Your final artwork file

Whether you work traditionally or digitally there are certain things you’ll need to take into consideration when creating the final file to send to the printers (unless you’re printing it on your own printer).

Here’s a checklist to make sure you have everything covered:

• Is your illustration suitable for the target market of the contacts you’re send it to?
• Have you included the following contact details?:
• Your name
• Your email address
• Your website url
• Your phone number
• Is the text on your mailer legible (both in size and font style)?
• Do you have a licence to use the font you’ve chosen?
• Is your artwork file set up in the correct colour mode (check if the printer you’re sending it to require the artwork in CMYK or RGB)?
• Is your artwork file high resolution (ideally 300dpi)
• Is your artwork file set up at the right dimensions (check with the printer you’re sending it to)?
• Have you included bleed on your artwork file (industry standard is 3mm)?
• If creating a pdf of your artwork to send to the printer, have you embedded the fonts?

Once you’ve checked off all of the above, the only thing left to do is send the file to the printers and wait for that exciting package of mailers to arrive

When to send your mailers out

We wouldn’t advise sending your first mailer out this side of the holiday season (unless it’s a specific holiday themed one) as it could easily get overlooked with the volume of extra mail Art Directors and Publishers are likely to get at this time of year.

We’d recommend waiting until the 2nd week of January to give things time to settle down and people chance to get back to their regular working lives again.

Remember that sending out promo mailers isn’t a one time deal. You may be lucky enough to get interest from your first contact but don’t get disheartened if you don’t – stick to your schedule of sending out mailers, make sure your contact list is always kept up to date and consider following your mailers up with a phone call.

Important: Although this challenge has focused mainly on creating a printed promo mailer, don’t let budget constraints hold you back from marketing and promoting your work, consider creating and send out an email version to your contact list.

That’s a wrap

Thank you for following along with the challenge – we hope you’ve found it useful this time round and something that you can refer to each time you create a new promo mailer.

If you’ve taken part in the challenge we’d love to showcase your finished mailers on zero2illo – simply email me a jpeg of the front and back of your mailer and we’ll put them on the blog.

We’d also like to take this opportunity to send out a special thank you to our sponsor for the challenge Agency Access.