Buying Boxes and Tape the wise way

If your whole company shifts into the new eCommerce platform then you have a lot of work to do.  We all know that this year of online shopping and selling of almost all items.  So many companies are not even working at a building but entirely from home.  People have changed their habits and you must accommodate. 

When it comes to budgets and marketing I never imagined the small things would actually cost so much.  It really is amazing what overlooking a simple item can do to a budget that is meant to cut costs for a company.  This happened this year. The pandemic caused our company to shift a little of what it normally has others do for it to a more internal workforce.  We decided to move some of our marketing inside and we are now doing all of our direct mailings online. 

This has meant that we needed to purchase a lot of supplies to do our own direct mailing marketing and some of the items ended up costing a whole lot for not being so effective.  The fact is that what we all think works well is not the correct answer when it comes to doing this professionally. So here are some tips we learned the hard way. 

Being lien in this time is important.   It really is an amazing task for learning how to save money and do it in ways we never imagined.  We went to all levels of crazy to make it happen. So, at first, our goal was to have our own staff take some time out of their days to work on each project.  This was an area we thought we could cut costs and we decided it was only fair if we all pitched in equally.  On a regular basis, we realized that most of us messed around for about an hour a day trying to either be social or just taking breaks.  So we knew that each member of our company could take one hour a day to work on marketing and be social and try to enjoy it.  That was our goal and it seems that most people really don’t mind the break from their work.  Switching things up a bit can be fun.

Finding the right teams are important too.  We organized shifts for each stage of our direct mailing projects.  This meant that we would have one group print labels and put them on a letter with a stamp.  In one hour we could have up to 500 of those ready to go and then the next group would take the letters and fold them and put them in the envelopes.  Then they could have 500 almost ready to go.  But we then had the last group seal the letters and put a wax stamp on them.  It was truly a process and it turned out to be the fastest way to get everything done in turns. 

What we learned from this was that we could call up packaging supplies companies and learn how to use the correct items for each project.  We also found that these companies had big discounts for shipping supplies when ordered in bulk.  We saved money and that was a big win for us.