Direct mail—postcards, flyers, letters, self-mailers—is consistently shown to be an effective strategy for securing more leads, higher sales, and better customer retention. Yet some businesses and marketers avoid using it because they fear it’s too complicated and too pricey compared to digital forms of advertising and communications.
It’s true that, traditionally, direct mail could be cumbersome to produce. It required long print runs to be cost-effective, there was a lot of back and forth with the printer to produce a press-ready file, and tracking was lackluster at best.
That’s no longer the case. Today, it’s much easier to create, send, and track all types of direct mail and to integrate them into a multi-channel marketing program. Postalytics, for example, is a one-stop service that creates, prints, mails, manages campaigns, and tracks results. With our array of tools, your staff can do most of this work from the office without hiring expensive graphic designers or mailing professionals.
Design, Production, and Distribution
Let’s start with direct mail creation. We have a vast selection of pre-built templates for creating postcards and other pieces. All have been produced by professional designers. The templates feature effective designs for any chosen product, calls to action that is placed to get noticed, tools for leveraging the power of pURLs, and formatting that follows relevant mailing specifications in terms of address placement and size. A varied choice of acceptable stock for printing and mailing is available.
You needn’t worry about following postal service regulations for mailpiece design. Postalytics ensures your communications are within the USPS or Canada Post specifications.
Here’s an excellent article that outlines how the Postalytics designer works.
Of course, you always have the option of using an outside design tool to create the direct mail pieces you send via Postalytics.
Plenty of Options, but None of the Risk
Should you choose, it’s quite easy to personalize any direct mail run. Our variable data feature customizes up to 35 fields, such as first name, last name, address, or any custom field you choose. Postalytics can act on data from a list you provide or get data directly from CRMs, such as Salesforce.
Our address verification system checks all addresses in real-time and dedupes your list with the USPS API tool. You can rest easy that postal carriers will deliver all pieces to the right mailboxes in either the U.S. or Canada. Even mailing rookies can be confident their direct mail campaigns will flow smoothly from mailpiece creation to delivery, with tracking along the way.
Using dashboards, it’s easy to select volumes and the type of direct mail campaign you want to deploy: A Smart Send campaign or a Triggered Drip campaign. Smart Send launches a campaign from a single source like a mailing list; Triggered campaigns integrate direct-mail drips into your CRM. Postalytics can create and mail pieces based on an action or trigger in your CRM, giving you ultimate flexibility and control.
In the dashboard, you can also specify which mail category you wish to choose, including First Class, Presorted First Class, Standard Mail, and Nonprofit Mail. Each comes with different pricing structures, delivery speeds, and tracking options. Our system walks you through the process, ensuring each step is complete before moving on to the next.
Not sure which USPS mailing class to use? Check out this handy article about first-class vs. standard-class direct mail.
Regardless of what option you choose, Postalytics can track all mail using the USPS Intelligent Mail Barcode tools. You’ll know when mail has been delivered, which has been returned, and whether recipients are responding online. Dashboards track information in real-time, just like you experience with digital campaigns. You can synchronize with your CRM and automatically trigger the next step in your marketing workflow based on actions customers take with your postal mail campaigns.
Of course, we take care of printing and preparing all pieces to enter the mainstream seamlessly and successfully.
Postalytics has taken a complex and cumbersome process and automated it for maximum efficiency and ease of use. Any company, from a large corporation that needs to produce hundreds of thousands of pieces to a small business with less than 1,000 postcards, can leverage the power of direct mail without getting bogged down by complicated logistics and without fear of making costly errors.