Tis the season to be mailing … cards, calendars, gifts! So it’s time to dust off your GoldMine label reports. Since some of you may be rusty, here are some thoughts on the subject.
Printing mailing labels for Primary contacts is generally not much of a problem. You just need to apply a GoldMine Filter or Group to select your records and then run the “Avery 5160 Primary Contacts” label report. (More about Additional contacts in a moment!) Sometimes the label format needs to be adjusted a bit. For example, you may want to use a different or smaller font. Or, you may need to adjust the label around a bit to help it to fit. Long addresses are sometimes a problem.
To modify the format of your label report, go into the Report Layout. If you’re unsure of what you’re doing, I suggest you clone to make a copy of the original report before you make any modifications, or contact First Direct for assistance.
Do you need to Print Labels for GoldMine Additional Contacts based on a Merge Code? Here’s a report you can use. Just download this report and save it in your GoldMine “Reports” folder, and then add it to your GoldMine Reports menu. When you run this report it will prompt you for a “Merge Code.” Enter the Code (case counts) in the two prompts fields and this will select only Additional Contacts with this Code. If you want to select multiple Codes you may need to run the labels multiple times.
Other Label Printing Hints:
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- Check the Sort order of your report so your labels come out in the order you want. If you’re printing personalized letters be sure to use the sample Group sorted in the same order as your labels. This will make it much easier to do a “matched mailing.”
- If you’re mailing to contacts in the United States, make sure your Country field is blank. If your Country field is filled in with U.S.A for example, then it will get printed on you label. There’s no need to use up a line for that, so just leave it blank!
- Use fonts that the United States Postal Service accepts. Courier New or Times New Roman will work fine.
- Use black, versus a color. The USPS character recognition software doesn’t like red!
- Reduce font size to 9 point to help you fit more on each label
- Be aware that the fields built into this label report are set to “wrap” so that if an address line is too long to fit on one line, it will drop a portion to the next line. This is the biggest cause of addresses not fitting onto labels. I Suggest you run the report onto paper, versus label sheets first so you know which Contacts present a problem. If it’s no too many, you may just want to write out a few addresses.
Here are links to more specific information on USPS regulations about the face of a mail piece or mailing and shipping guidelines for business.
