Questions
Setting it up
Do I have to approve every mailing?
You approve your card once. After that, matching and mailing run on their own every week. If you change the offer or the photo, you approve the new version and it replaces the old one. You can turn on a weekly review if you want to skip specific businesses before they mail.
How long does setup take?
About ten minutes. You upload a logo and a photo, pick or write an offer, confirm your return address and the phone the tracking number should ring, and approve the card. Nothing mails until you do.
The card
Who is the card from?
You. Your name, your logo, your return address, your phone. We are the print shop and the mail room. The new business never sees our name.
How many cards does each new business get?
Each matched business gets five cards over three months on the standard plan: the week they open, a week later, then at three, seven and twelve weeks. A follow-up stops on its own once the business calls or asks for a quote. A heavier plan (eight cards), a lighter one (two) and a single card are all settings. Each follow-up is a card at $2.49 and counts toward your monthly cap.
What does the card actually look like?
A 6x9 landscape card, printed both sides, sent first class. The front has your photo, your logo, one headline, one offer with a date on it, your first name and the tracking number. The back has three sentences written to that business by name, a QR code to a page built for them, and your return address.
Can I change the offer later?
Yes, at any time. Approve the new version and it goes out with the next batch. The old card stops being used the moment the new one is approved.
The records
How do you know a business actually opened?
Public county, city and state business records are read every day: new business filings, licences and tax certificates, health and liquor permits. Each record is then confirmed against a live listing at a real street address. Registered-agent offices, residential addresses and mailboxes are filtered out. If an address turns out to be undeliverable, that card is credited back on your next invoice.
Is this data public? Could I get it myself?
Yes, and mostly free. The records are published by counties, cities and states, and the article library shows you where to look. What is paid for here is everything after the record: confirming the address, dropping the ones that are not a place you can mail, matching each opening to what you sell, writing and printing the card, mailing it the week they open, logging the calls and sending the report.
Can I see the list without mailing?
Yes. Every match shows in your dashboard with a phone number from the public record or a public listing, whichever the record carried, whether or not a card goes out.
Your area
What if there are not enough new businesses near me?
Matching starts from your own city at the radius on your account and widens automatically, fifteen miles at a time, up to thirty miles past it, until you have at least 15 matches a month. If it cannot get you there, that month's fee is waived.
Is my area covered?
Type your city, county or ZIP on the coverage page and it will tell you. An area whose record feeds are running today can start now. An area whose feeds are not running yet gets a place on the list and an email the week it is, and no account and no charge in the meantime.
The money
What results should I expect?
EarlyHello does not publish a response rate, a customer count, a rating or a payback period. No B2B benchmark exists for mail to businesses that just opened, and an estimate presented as a fact is not something a buyer can check. What is checkable is in the vendor's own dashboard: every call, text and scan, logged against the card that earned it, next to what that card cost.
What does it cost?
$59.99 a month plus $2.49 per card mailed. Cards are billed as they mail, so a quiet month costs less and a month with no matches is the base fee alone. The first 10 billable cards on a new account are free.
How do I cancel?
From your dashboard, in two clicks, at any time. There is no contract, no notice period and no call to make. Pausing is there too if you would rather keep the account and stop the mail.
What happens if a card cannot be delivered?
That card is credited back to your account and the credit comes off your next invoice. An address the printer cannot verify is held before it prints rather than mailed and written off, and the match stays on your list so you can still call.
Your information, and theirs
Are the calls recorded?
Not unless you turn recording on yourself. The tracking number logs the caller's number, the time, how long the call ran and which card it came from, and records no audio. Recording is off on every account until it is switched on in Settings, and when it is on the caller hears a short notice before the call connects, so both parties are told.
What do you store about the businesses you mail?
The business name, the trading name, the type, the mailing address, a phone number from the public record or a public listing, and the date it opened. A confirmation lookup against a public listing is also stored: the listing id, the name it carries, its coordinates and what the check returned. Owner names and home-based businesses are dropped rather than mailed, and a business that asks to be removed is removed from the public pages, from every customer's dashboard and from the next mail batch.
Not answered here?
Support answers in plain words and will tell you when the answer is no. The longer versions of several of these have their own pages: how the week runs, where the records come from, the price, the guarantee, how information is handled and your area.
See whether the records where you work are running.
Type a city, county or ZIP. If the area is running you can start now. If it is not, you go on the list and hear from us the week it is, and nothing is charged in the meantime.
Check my area