Extend your brand with custom postage stamps

In our digital marketing, email and evite world of today, a direct mail piece often stands out and sets your company and message apart. To up the polish and wow-factor, consider ordering custom postage stamps with your unique design. It’s a great way to grab the recipient’s attention and provides a novel way to extend your company’s brand.

Now, if you’ve ever ordered custom greeting cards online, you may have seen this idea as an add-on option during the checkout process. Consumers have long used the option on everything from wedding or party invitations to holiday cards.

The Concept & Design

• Are you mailing holiday cards to your clients, prospects and network?
• Do you have an upcoming milestone anniversary or party for your business?
• Are you launching a new product or service and will include a direct mail component?
• Do you regularly send out personal handwritten note cards of thanks?

Custom postage stamps are a great option when you want to convey a more personalized touch to a mailing, support a major announcement for your business or celebrate a milestone.

You may wonder what makes sense in terms of the actual design to include and quite honestly, your imagination is the limit. A few examples of how we’ve seen custom postage work best:

1. Company logos or icons from the logo crafted as the stamp.
2. An anniversary banner or medallion to commemorate 20 years in business, or the like.
3. An app icon or product logo to support a product launch. (Notice the sample pictured here from one of our clients that we used to support a combined holiday card and app announcement. It’s the app icon turned into a stamp.)
4. A photograph of your product itself.
5. A special event, party or conference with the stamp extended to the theme and design of the party invitation.
6. Even a “text as art” that just relays a message of thank you, your company’s tagline or website address.

If you’d like to explore this concept more, we’d be happy to chat with you or even help create your official stamp.

The Process & Cost

The custom postage process is quite simple overall. The United States Postal Service website lists some recommended vendors who offer custom stamp services, including:

• Zazzle
• PhotoStamps
• PictureItPostage

Once you’ve determined the vendor, you:

• Select your postage value, based on the size and weight of the piece you are mailing.
• Choose your preferred stamp size from the online options.
• Indicate your preferred stamp orientation. If you are working with a square or landscape image, you’ll want to select horizontal (or landscape). If your image is portrait, you will want the vertical orientation option.
• Upload your image. Most services provide detailed directions on the file formats and guidelines.
• Change other settings as desired, such as ink color, background color, etc. You can even add additional text.

Now, custom postage stamps do cost more than traditional postage but are well worth the expense for certain marketing campaigns. The rates vary based on the vendor, printing specifications and quantity.

In recent comparison shopping, we found Zazzle to offer the best pricing overall. In our case, we ordered 500 standard first-class stamps at a cost of .9775 cents per .49 cent stamp. As with anything you print, the per unit cost decrease as the volume increases.

And don’t fret if you’re short on time. All the vendors offer express shipping. In our case, we had stamps in hand within two days.

One way that we’ve offset some of the additional postage cost is to print the envelopes in one color of ink versus two or more colors; the custom postage stamp allows the visual impact to still be achieved with the color on the stamp itself.

Happy mailing!

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