<<RANT>>. 3000 yellow letters down the drain!! Mail merge SNAFU

[Phil B.]

So I'm doing a large 6000 piece yellow letter mailer.  I worked all day in my hot, stuffy office on my only day off (today) and printed 3000 of the 6000 mailers.  They looked fantastic!  Very productive, but exhaustive day, right?

WRONG!!!

When I did my mail merge, I accidentally put the out of state mailing address in my letter where the property address was supposed to go.

Instead of my letter saying "Hi John, I want to buy your out of state investment property", mine say "Hi John, I want to buy the darned house you are living in 1200 miles away from me!"

What a total screw up.  It took me all day to get these perfect never mind all the ink and paper I wasted.

The moral of the story:  check your mail merge 5 times before sending 3000 to the printer.  Grrrrrrr.  Live and learn.

[Jerry Puckett]

@Phil B. , I feel your pain. I've made that exact same mistake plus many more while scaling the learning curve. A job that big makes sense to outsource for sure.

One of the things I do to minimize mistakes is to break things down to smaller batches. I only print what I'm going to mail that week. Cuts back on waste, but also allows me to test and tweak as I go.

Another thing I do is to keep a checklist handy. There are a lot of moving parts and I double check them all. Each new run I print off a dozen or so....stop....verify, then proceed at high speed with the rest of the run.

Lastly, get another set of eyes to proof your work. Booth your spread sheet and your printing.