Please Mr. Postman

Snail mail is supposedly dead, but I still love getting the mail. Always have, always will. My mail infatuation began with the green Sweet Pickles bus. Since then, I've spent my life checking the mail for the equivalent of coolness. Few things have come close.

Oh, does this bring me back! All those little cards and file folders with games and activities. Remember he nifty map on the inside covers of the books with all of the character's houses? I could just imagine what it would be like to walk around their little town. Me Too, Iguana was my favorite. Did you have Sweet Pickles books when you were a kid? 

"I want some good mail!" I can hear my dad saying it, as he thumbs through bills and credit card applications, and I totally know what he means. Good mail: stuff like catalogs and birthday cards and magazines and surprise packages. I remember actively soliciting for "good mail" at a very young age. If there was an ad for a free catalog in the back of a magazine, I would send away for it. Never mind that I was only about 7 or 8 years old and that I had as much use for a rototiller as I did a pair of orthopedic shoes. It was just fun to get mail. "Any mail for me?" I said it every day.

Later on, I would discover the joys of "5 for 99 cents" operations like Book of the Month and Columbia House Record Clubs. That was before you had to furnish a credit card number on business reply mail- how I loved to check that little box next to the words "bill me later." It made for good mail- and bad credit. But that's another story.

The Post Office has announced that they are cutting down their work week to save operating costs- yet another indication of the slow death of snail mail. But I'm not counting it out just yet. In fact, I'm placing my faith in it. Hubby and I were discussing how to promote The Big Red Barn, and the idea of direct mail came up. I had never really thought much about doing direct mail because I figured that the cost of postage would be entirely too high and, even if it wasn't, that I didn't have access to a worthwhile mailing list. Still, I thought I would look into the idea some more and discovered that The US Post Office has a fairly new program called Every Door Direct Mail (Retail). The program allows small businesses to mail items at a great discounted rate without having to buy a mailing permit. What's more, you can specify where you want your mail to go by carrier route and you don't have to have "real" addresses.   

So now I'm working on some postcards with EDDM dimensions (larger than regular letter or postcard size) and brainstorming on how to make them noticeable, keep-able, and effective.

Hopefully, friends and customers I haven't met yet will consider our mail to be "good mail," and our bright, colorful postcard won't get thrown out with the dollar store ads and pizza coupons. Fingers crossed! :-)