bing enables you to send postal mail quickly and easily, however when you want to do a large mail merge with a document that is a large file (perhaps because of lots of pictures), here's a little tip that can make it much quicker and easier!
Let's say your posting a mail merge letter to 5,000 recipients, and the letter looks something like the one below. Note that there are quite a few images, and because they're going to be printed, they are high-res and therefore large file size - each individual page is 400kb.
When you create a 5,000 mail merge of this document, you end up with 5,000 pages exactly like this one, meaning you have a file roughly 2000 MB in size! You can of course PDF the document to reduce the file size, but even then you're still going to have a document around 1500 MB in size which is going to take a long time to upload via the internet to the bing mailroom.
So, what can you do to make this mailout much quicker and easier? Well, it's really quite simple. As you know, you are able to upload letterheads to your bing account in a few seconds. This then enables you to apply the letterhead to any mailout you're doing. The key to this is that the letterhead is only uploaded to the bing mailroom once and is applied to all your letters in the merge - it is not uploaded 5,000 times for a 5,000 letter mailout!
So, here's what you can do to make this same letter mailout much easier. First, remove the "merged" data from the letter and save that version. That means you would remove the name, address and any other dynamic data from your original letter so it would look like this.
Upload this version of the letter to your bing account and save it as a letterhead - give it a name that is specific to this particular mailout as you will most likely only use it for this mailout and will want to delete it after this mailing is complete.
Now, go back to your original document and remove all content from the document so that all you see is the merged content (ie. the name, address and salutation line). You should now do the mail merge with this plain document, so that you create 5,000 pages that look just like the one below.
Now, you can go ahead and print this mailing to bing. Select the option in the Mailroom preview to "add letterhead" and select the one you created earlier. When you preview your document you will see that it looks just like the first image in this article (ie. how your letter should look!), but instead of uploading that entire document 5,000 times, you're now only uploading a very small word document with just name and addresses in it which will only take a couple of minutes!
If you have any questions or would like me to further clarify something, please don't hesitate to contact us!
TrackBack URI for this entry
Subscribe to this comment's feed
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
