Direct Mail Pieces Printing
in Encino, Same Day

Every door direct mail printing has one extra step most other print jobs skip, the piece has to survive a mail sorting machine and arrive looking the way it did when it left our press. We print direct mail postcards and self mailers on stock heavy enough to move through USPS equipment without bending or scuffing corners, the same approach we used running fundraiser postcards for Degas Dance Company, which needed hundreds of matching pieces ready to hand off for mailing on a real date, not a rough estimate someone had to guess at.

A lot of Valley businesses come to us after ordering direct mail online and getting a file that technically prints but is not actually built to a mailing standard, wrong size, no room for a permit indicia, address panel in the wrong spot. We check every direct mail file for USPS sizing before it runs, as part of our normal file check, so the postcards you get back are ready to hand to a mailing house or drop at the post office without a second round of edits or a rejected batch.

Files in by 10 AM on a standard postcard or self mailer run are usually ready the same afternoon by 3:30 PM. Bigger direct mail runs, a few thousand pieces covering several zip codes across Encino and North Hollywood, can take into the next morning once you factor in cutting and any coating, and we tell you that turnaround before you commit to the quantity, not after the job is already sitting on press.

Direct mail printing los angeles searches usually turn up national mail houses that require a minimum order in the tens of thousands. We do not have a minimum. A Burbank contractor testing a new neighborhood can order five hundred postcards to see what response looks like before committing to a full route across the Valley. Once you know a piece works, we keep the file on record so scaling up to a bigger run for the next quarter is a reorder, not a redesign from scratch, and not a new minimum to clear.

Corner rounding and stock weight matter more on direct mail than on almost anything else we print, because the piece gets run through sorting equipment, stacked with other mail and handled by more than one person before it reaches a mailbox. A thin postcard curls and jams. We run direct mail on a heavier card stock built to move through that process clean, the same stock we used on the Degas Dance Company fundraiser postcards that needed to survive a full mail run without a single damaged piece in the batch.

The address side of a mail piece has rules that a flyer does not, clear space for the address, a spot sized correctly for a stamp or an indicia, and enough margin that a barcode or sort code does not print over your return address. We lay these out correctly by default and check any file a client sends us against the same rules, so nothing gets held up or returned by the post office after it has already been printed and paid for by your office, which is a headache nobody wants to fix twice.

Coordinating a direct mail drop with pickup and delivery saves a step for a lot of our Valley clients. Once a run is done we can hand a finished box straight to your mail house driver, or if the order is, our own delivery van can bring it to your office in Woodland Hills or Sherman Oaks the same afternoon it comes off press. Either way, the goal is one less stop between the printer and the mailbox, and one less thing on your plate before a mail date.

Direct mail has a mistake unique to it that other print jobs do not: the mailing panel. A postcard or self mailer needs a specific blank area sized and placed for postage and a barcode, and a file designed without knowing that area exists usually has text or a photo sitting where the address needs to go. We check every direct mail file against postal mailing panel requirements before it runs, not just print resolution and bleed, because a beautiful postcard that gets rejected at the post office is a wasted run no matter how clean the design looks otherwise.

The second common problem is a mailing list mismatch, where the piece is designed for one size and the customer's list or mailing service expects another, which we catch by asking upfront rather than after printing 500 pieces the wrong dimension. Degas Dance Company's annual fundraiser postcards are a direct mail job we run every year, and because we keep the file and the panel specs on record, that order goes from email to press faster than a first time customer's. Every direct mail piece still gets a proof, since a wrong date or address on a mailed piece cannot be caught and fixed once it is in the mail.