Copyright 2015, Rob Swanson Training Systems, All Rights Reserved.

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2 DISCLAIMER This publication is indented to provide accurate and authoritative information with regard to the subject matter covered. The Handwritten Postcard System is not legal advice and nothing herein should be taken as legal, tax or any professional advice. Neither the publisher, trainers, employees, owners, contractors, distributors, affiliates, nor anyone associated with this publication and/or presentation are offering legal, tax nor any professional advice or advice requiring a license. You must seek the professional council of your legal and/or tax advisor and/or the professional services of someone duly licensed to provide such advice. This information product is intended for instructional purposes only. Every effort has been made to reflect the applicable laws as of the date of the publication of this book. However, this is a dynamic field of endeavor in which new laws are enacted; old laws are revised and/or reinterpreted on a continuing basis and where statutes, rulings and case laws are constantly changing. Purchasers are advised to proceed with the techniques described herein with caution. The author, printers, licensees nor distributors make no warranties, express or implied about the merchantability or fitness for any particular use of this product. All rights are reserved under State and Federal Copyright Law. No part of this product may be reprinted, reproduced, paraphrased or quoted in whole or in part by any means without the express written permission of the publisher and author. 1

3 All right, it is Rick. I am back with the Handwritten Postcard System. You guys are doing great. We re getting down to the homestretch. We are in Module Three. This is Video Two. In this section, I m going to teach you how to run your mail merge and customize your personal information into your templates. Before we get started let s just recap. Remember, we have four total modules. Module One, we went through the overview of the direct mail system. Module Two, we actually showed you how to acquire your list. We downloaded a list. We went as far as editing your list to set up for your postcard print. Then in module three we are preparing your postcards, putting everything on your computer you need to set up and be able to print these beautifully handwritten postcards for you. In the previous Module Three, Video One remember I showed you how to do the installing fonts. It s a nice short video. It s really simple. If you haven t done that, go back and make sure your fonts are installed before doing your first mail merge, very important. Right now here we are. We are going to teach you how to run and execute a mail merge. I m also going to teach you how to customize your templates. After that we re going to go into Module Four. We re actually going to be able to print your postcards. We re going to talk about the mailing techniques on them and some simple follow up with it. Let me jump right in here and get everything set up for you. This is the actual mailing list I have set up here. You will actually have a downloadable file within module number three which is the one you re in right now. It should say Handwritten Postcard Templates. 2

4 There are different packages with this. This is just for an example for you. When you open up your Handwritten Postcard Templates we basically have three set up in this. This should be in yours. The first one is an Absentee Owner template. The back refers to the back of a postcard,which is going to be your ad message. We re sending to our motivated sellers. The next one is a Buy Your House postcard. This is going to be the back print. That is going to be a little bit different template there. These two right here you ve already clicked them. We need to open them up in your Word document and customize the personal information on it for you. This is really easy. Let me go ahead. Just go ahead and click the first one. Let me maximize the window there. There it is click enable editing. This is the back of our postcard. Remember I showed you the image earlier on what the front and the back looked like. The stuff highlighted in yellow is the stuff that we must change out and put your personal information in. what I d like to do is just go ahead and put your information in it. I ve got Sally Smith. See how easy that is. Say she s in Orange County. Some people say, Rick, why do you use county a lot of times if you do mailers in a specific county? it s just easier because you don t have to change the template every time you print. You can go in here and put in Orlando. You can put in Fort Lauderdale. You can customize it however you want. Just make sure that if you re doing the entire county you don t put in a specific city or you re going to confuse your customers. I like county just for organizational purposes it really streamlines the process. It tells me what county the property is in, a local cash buyer. We work down here and we ve obviously had to put your information in here. 3

5 Let s just say your phone number is 321. Remember all we are doing is replacing it and so it s really easy 743 and 6041 and just to link the old stuff out of there. I promise you we re going to go right back to where it appears there. On the phone number I want you to go over to the highlight button. It s either text highlight color. Click that option and click no color. I ve tried putting color in the background. I don t get good results. I think it irritates people. I would recommend against not doing that. We want to change the name. Simply put we have Sally here. Sally is going to rock and boom. You see how it tilts it automatically for you. We do that tilt on purpose because it looks much more personable and it looks like it was handwritten. Nobody writes in a straight line. This is how you set up your postcard, the postcard in your templates is another one or we buy houses postcard. You can do exact same thing. Just change out the highlighted yellow areas. You say, Rick, maybe you want to make your phone number bigger. That s fine. Just go over here to the font. You can blow it up if you want. Don t make it too big, but this is about 28. You can take it up to like a 32 if you want to handwrite it in. You can play with it. Let s try like 32 that s too big. Let s try 30 see if it fits no, maybe 29. Yeah 29 is the biggest you can go on this. My recommendation if you re just starting out on this, do not move around the templates, this highlighted box around it. It s already preset for you. Do not move it around because it can get you into problems. Stick with the plan that works. These are tested and proven postcards. If you want to change the color ink just highlight. You can highlight everything. Blue is very popular it works well. That s great. 4

6 My recommendation though is try to keep everything the same color, because if you want to make it handwritten, if you got three million colors going on it might be a little irritating. I left the phone number a different color, it s 50/50. I don t think it really makes that big of a difference. Let s just say we do that in blue. That s it that s your postcard in blue. This is how to customize your postcard to set up your personal information. Make sure when you re done with this you can click file I click save. I would save your postcard and title it however you want to do it. It s important you save it. If you don t save it you have to redo this every time you do the Handwritten Postcard System. We re about efficiency. I want you to take the time and save your postcards. If this is Sally s I would put absentee owner Sally. That way we know it s Sally. You might want to refer to it Orange County. I d probably put OC. However you want to save it, whatever your organization style is but once you set this up once and we stick with it and get it done, and that s how you set up the handwritten postcard template with your customized information. Let me get out of here. Let s go back to your folder. Now we have to do the front mail merge. This is where we re going to upload your edited Excel Spreadsheet that I hand walked you through and make the magic happen to this system. Remember if I said you ve never done a mail merge don t worry about it. I m going to walk you through the exact way you need to do it. The first time you do a mail merge, this little box is going to pop up. Just opening this document we ll run the following SQL command from list report. I want you to keep in mind you do not have any uploaded document, any type of database for your mail merge to work yet. The first time you do this you want to click no. 5

7 Mine s already auto populated because obviously I ve loaded this a bunch of times. When you first do it, I want you to go back and click that button no when the first box pops up and you ll be fine. Everybody got me, follow my little cursor here. I want you to go up to the tab labeled mailings. Then click mailings. Got me so far? Now we are going to you do not need to click start mail merge. We ve already set this up for you. The beauty of this system is you don t have to go through doing your whole setup. Everything we ve included in the system is done for you. We need to select recipients. You click select recipients, dropdown box. We re going to use an existing list. We are going to use the list that we previously edited in module two or direct sales spreadsheet. I click that and now it s going to ask me to find my list. Hopefully you know what you remember you saved it as. Remember, High Equity Palm Bay and Edit One, that s my list. It depends on how you saved it. It s going to come up. List report, that s the automatic default; name on it just leave it as is and do me a favor and click ok. Don t panic I know that looks strange but this is how the mail merge is set up. What each one of these parenthesis it s telling the Excel document where to put in all the names and addresses. Now that you ve done that remember we ve gone under select recipients use existing lists and you hunt down your edited Excel Spreadsheet which I taught you how to do. You narrowed it down to six column headings that we re going to use for this mail merge. Once you have the Excel Spreadsheet edited, you click that and it downloads just like this. Now come up. I want to see if this works. Click preview results, voila! There is your handwritten postcard. It is that easy. 6

8 Once you click preview results, how many names did I show you on this? It was 10, so just right arrow. It will show you each one: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. It is that simple. We need to come down and just change the return address. This is part of customizing the front. We had Sally Smith. Just change it. We ll put her at 200. I think she s on Martin Street. Say she lives on Palm Bay, 329. Just go in and put in your information. Once you set it once you can remove your top name off there. Sometimes that leaves some intrigue in the postcard because quite frankly your sellers aren t going to know who Sally Smith is when they first leave it. Sometimes you can take if you want. You can delete this name. You can take it off there. It leaves some of the intrigue off. I don t know, it s 50/50 so whatever you re most comfortable with that s what I would do. That s what works the best for me. I m going to close the header and the footer. That s it, your postcard s set up. You can do one or you can do 10,000 postcards. It doesn t matter, and let me just walk you through it one more time. You re going to go to mailing. Do not do start mail merge. It s already set up for you. You re going to click select recipients, use existing list. You re going to find the list to use which is that one. I want to do this twice. Then that s going to upload all the information. Click preview results. Confirm you have the right amount. This is the beginning. This is the end very, very simple. A couple of tips for you, and this is important. I got a life experience in this. You ll see here. Sometimes people have really, really long addresses. It s important you look through quite a few samples to make sure everything fits within there. Let s see what numbers I use a 22 size font, but this is all going to depend on the size font that you pick. If you with a larger style font you want to be aware and make sure that the address fits on the postcard. In particular on the name s never too hard but the bottom, the street address, the mailing address if it s too big it will actually run off and get off. 7

9 Obviously if it does that they know you didn t handwrite it. You want to be aware of that when you re doing it. If you want to change the size, don t make it too big. If it gets too big it doesn t work. You ll see here, we do bolding it makes it a fuller richer print which mimics the actual style of a felt pen handwriting newsletter. The bold is on purpose. I know it s there. It s not a problem. If you want to change the type of font, that s a different style there. You re going to here if you want to match it up. I had that on a special font with that. Let me see if I can find it. It was called Michelle. Do you notice when I switched from the one font to the next it made the print a little bit bigger. You need to go through your printers and you click mailing. You can just go through and make sure they all fit. They all look like they fit nicely and comfortably. The other thing too is on this mail merge. You can play around with this if you want. I don t recommend at the beginning. If you want to change the name and stuff to let s talk about or call me about. I ve done call me about. If you want to do call me and it makes it a little bit shorter. If I do something like that you can just grab this and just move it over to line it up. You can play around with that and line it up. You want to leave enough room because if I move it too close here it will cut off my T. These are preset up boxes. I m just saying I m showing you, we talked about doing customizable changes. It s easy to do that. Another thing that you need to be aware of is address can sometimes be long. This is probably your most dangerous section if the address was going to run over. 8

10 Let s go through a couple of tests to make sure it doesn t run over. It s not a problem. Last but not least, these are what we call text boxes in the print world. If you use say I highlight this and I decide to put a larger font, maybe I want to make it stand out. It will help if I highlighted it. I m going to go with the bigger fonts though. I don t recommend this because if the font s too big it s going to scroll off your page. Notice there, it s cut it off. Don t panic. There is nothing wrong with it. The box is just too small. You ve made the font much bigger. If you decide to do this, slide it down so the whole thing fits, and it s that simple. I don t want you doing it, but for those of you who want to play around and customize maybe you want to switch your message. You want to do mobile homes or vacant homes. This is how you go in and change a template around if you want. I m going put this right back to where I had it. I can t change the word for now but Call me about 366 Godfrey Rd SE. See this, I left. I didn t change the size on that so it stuck out like a sore thumb. You want it all blended perfectly. It s a little too high so let s scoot it down. That looks about right. This is it on doing your mail merge. I want you to refer back to this video if you have any issues. It s very simple. It s very straightforward. I m confident this will work for you. This sums up the module three. I ll check back with you and walk you into Module Four. Thank you. 9