Carthage College Encourages Admitted Students to ‘Take the Next Step’ with Custom Socks

Challenge

Carthage College was confident that students who visited their campus would be more likely to choose them as their college of choice, and was looking for a way to encourage admitted students to visit.

Solution

In order to build excitement and encourage admitted students to visit, Carthage was looking for a gift that would be fun for students to engage with, while also showing off their bold colors and brand, include a brief message, and would be easy to mail.

With those parameters in mind, the Magellan Promotions team recommended a branded sock with a hangtag.

Here are the major benefits to this option:

  • Socks are fully customizable, so they were designed with Carthage colors and fonts.
  • The hangtag is also fully customizable, meaning it could include a branded message, which Carthage used to impart a fun note to take their next steps (pun intended!) with a campus visit.
  • Unlike many wearable options, socks work across a larger audience, fitting across genders and sizes.
  • Small and lightweight, they can be mailed individually at a low cost.
Outcome

In addition to the fun of the socks themselves, Carthage College was also running parallel social media campaigns, including a scavenger hunt where one of the tasks was to take a picture in Carthage gear. Most of the time, the socks were the main focus of the task! Students often wore the socks to their campus visits and even to scholarship events.

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Variable Data Best Practices

  • At the quoting stage of your project, please let us know how many fields of variable data your piece will have as this can affect pricing.
  • Data should be provided to us as an Excel spreadsheet with only the applicable data included.
  • Verbiage for variable data fields on artwork file should match up exactly with data fields on spreadsheet.
  • Spacing on artwork must allow for longest data entries. We recommend that your designer tests this in advance to confirm that the fields in the design can fit your longest pieces of data.

Postage Permits

We are happy to mail using a client’s USPS non-profit number. Here are a few best practices for this to go smoothly. Let our team know up front on the project so we can make sure to get the information we need right away. 

While our mail house does prefer to use their permit number for the mailing, we can use the client’s permit, If using their permit number, ensure there is enough postage to cover the mailing.

The information we need to in order to use a client’s nonprofit number includes the following:

  • CRID (customer registration ID)
  • Non-Profit Authorization Number (with USPS, not their nonprofit number for the university)
  • Non-profit indicia
  • Return address that is on file with USPS for the non-profit authorization number
  • Permit number

Formatting the Mailing List

Our account team will advise on specific requirements for your project’s mailing list.  We generally recommend these best practices to format the mailing list:
  • Send your data in a spreadsheet, saving it in the comma-separated values (CSV) format
  • International addresses must be separated from domestic addresses
  • Domestic addresses should at least contain data fields for “first name”, “last name”, “address 1”, “address 2”, “city”, “state” and “ZIP code”