Postal Marketing

[Business Brian]

Here's a silly thing that happened.

The other day I received a card from the postman, through the letterbox.

Apparently I had a letter waiting for me at the delivery office. And the reason it was staying there was because insufficient postage has been provided. I was asked to pay £1.14 to collect it.

Now, I had no idea what this letter or package may be. My first thought was that it was junk mail. I very nearly ignored it.

But £1.14 delivery charge? That bugged me. That either meant a package or a recorded delivery letter. That meant it was likely something important.

So after a couple of days I resolved to go collect it. That required a short-drive and a run through the rain on a Saturday morning. It was an annoyance, and a nuisance.

When I arrived at the sorting office it was simply a plain A4 envelope. I had hoped for some indication of content. The man behind the desk was very hesitant for me to even hold it, even though they had my details (as if wanted to incur the wrath of the criminal justice system over £1.14).

So I paid and opened it.

It was merely the newsletter of a local archaeology group I'd recently joined. It had been posted out with a second class stamp, even though it was slightly over the postal limit for that weight.

To be clearer: you can post up to 60g of material by an ordinary stamp – first or second class – but the moment you go over that limit, you are priced according to the up to 100g limit. And that is what had happened here.

The postage itself was only 14p short, but the Royal Mail had decided to add a £1 handling charge, for the trouble of a postman driving up to my door way, jumping out the cab, and then slipping me the failed delivery card through my letterbox.

So the moral of this tail is: when conducting any form of postal communication, do ensure that you have paid for the correct weight. After all, if you want to start a marketing campaign with brochures and sales information, it is very easy to get it wrong.

In this instance, it was only a local interest group posting to members. But don’t be complacent. It's an easy – and potentially very damaging – mistake to make.
 
 

[altyfc]

A good point, Brian.
 
I get about one of these per quarter, and they are very annoying.  Luckily, though, I pass the post office every day when I go to get lunch, so it's not as much as inconvenience as it could be.  Still annoying, though...

Aaron

[Suzanne]

You can be a fool to do postal marketing in the US. Sometimes it's easier to send international than local.