Do Your Direct Mail Postcards Need Professional Review?

Are you preparing to launch a direct mail campaign? Direct mail postcards can be extremely powerful and effective marketing tools, but small issues like text that’s too close to the postcard’s edges can severely affect their effectiveness.

From low-resolution images to rare and unsupported fonts, issues that seem small at first can quickly turn into disasters for your direct mail campaign if they slip by unnoticed before your postcards are printed.

One of the best ways to make sure your postcards are error-free is to have them professionally reviewed before being printed. In this post, we’ll share the biggest benefits of having your direct mail campaign reviewed by a professional. 

Print on a small scale to spot potentially big problems early

Small issues can quickly turn into big problems if they’re spotted once your campaign is in the mail. When you get your postcards professionally reviewed, a small quantity are printed to check for print errors and compatibility issues.

Sometimes, the colors of your postcard don’t ‘pop’ in print like they do on an LCD screen due to different color profiles. Likewise, fonts that look sharp on the screen can look less crisp and readable when they’re printed on a postcard.

Since a professional postcard review involves printing your direct mail postcards, it’s a great opportunity for experienced professionals to spot imperfections before hundreds, or even thousands, of your postcards are printed for delivery.

Spot low-resolution images and missing postcard graphics

Images that look crisp and clear on your monitor may not look quite as good once they’re printed. Your computer’s display resolution might not reveal pixilation or artifacts in images, both of which can be more obvious on a printed postcard.

Likewise, graphics that appear on your computer – such as graphics that are part of a file but aren’t embedded properly in a postcard’s design – can often fail to show up in the printed version of your postcard.

Printing 10,000 postcards with a missing graphic or low-resolution image can be an expensive, time-consuming disaster. Luckily, these issues can be spotted in seconds as part of a professional direct mail postcard review.

Discover unsupported fonts that could affect your postcard’s design

If your postcard design uses rare fonts that aren’t supposed by all operating systems or graphic design applications, they could affect the printed design. Most computers replace unsupported fonts with the nearest equivalent, which isn’t always identical.

This could mean your sleek, modern sans-serif headline typeface is replaced with an alternative that, while somewhat similar, just doesn’t have the look that your direct mail campaign depends on.

As part of a professional postcard review, we’ll double-check that the fonts used in your postcard are supported by our system and that your order is only printed with its original, intended fonts intact.

Do your direct mail postcards need a professional review?

Your postcards might look great on the computer screen, but small issues that you can’t even see could affect them during printing. Find out if you need to invest in a professional postcard review to find and fix issues with your postcard design before they’re printed at scale.