Our February 25th, 2025, product update marks an exciting milestone for the future of automated direct mail marketing. We’re introducing Postalytics Flows, a game-changing new workflow automation tool for multi-touch campaign management.
Table of contents
- Say Goodbye to Spreadsheets and Manual Work
- Introducing Postalytics Flows
- Watch the Flows Release Webinar Video
- How Flows Works
- A/B Test or Split Test Your Direct Mail Creative
- Benefits of Using Flows
- Who Should Use Flows?
- Get Started with Flows
- Flows FAQ’s
- Additional Updates
- Introducing Postalytics Flows is Just the Beginning
Say Goodbye to Spreadsheets and Manual Work
For years, marketers have relied on spreadsheets and manual processes to manage multi-touch direct mail campaigns. This method is time-consuming, prone to errors, and makes it difficult to scale your efforts.
We see spreadsheets that look like this quite often:
But what if there was a better way? Why not let software handle this complexity, so your marketers can focus on marketing, not project management?
Introducing Postalytics Flows
Postalytics Flows is the first and only workflow automation software designed specifically for multi-touch direct mail campaigns. This innovative tool allows you to automate your entire direct mail process, from campaign creation to suppression list management.
With Flows, you can:
- Automate campaign execution: Set up your campaigns and let the software handle the rest.
- A/B Test your direct mail creative: Set a Split Action to automate the process of splitting contacts in a Flow between multiple sets of creative to see which creative works best for a particular audience.
- Manage suppression lists: Automatically add contacts to suppression lists based on specific criteria.
- Track campaign performance: Monitor your campaigns in real-time and see which ones are performing best.
- Integrate with your existing tools: Use API endpoints and webhooks to connect Flows with your CRM, marketing automation platform, or other tools.
Watch the Flows Release Webinar Video
This 40 minute webinar includes an overview of Flows, as well as other important Postalytics announcements, and an interesting Q&A with Postalytics customers at the end where we discuss potential use cases.
How Flows Works
Flows uses a simple, visual builder to create automated workflows for your direct mail campaigns. You can add unlimited “actions” to your workflows, such as sending mail, delaying by days, waiting for events, adding to lists, splitting for A/B testing, filtering based on contact properties, and sending webhooks.
Flows also includes detailed reporting and logging, so you can track every step of your campaigns and see how each contact is interacting with your mailings.
A/B Test or Split Test Your Direct Mail Creative
One of the most important reasons for the introduction of Postalytics Flows is to enable marketers to set up A/B or split tests quickly and easily. Simply develop the creatives you’d like to test, drop them into a campaign, and then deploy the Split by Distribution Action in your Flow. The Flow will randomly distribute the Contacts that reach that step into each Path that you designate, where you can “Send Mail” with the testing creative. You can monitor the performance and eventual winner in the Performance tab.
Benefits of Using Flows
- Save time and resources: Automate your direct mail process and free up your team to focus on other tasks.
- Improve campaign performance: Use automation and personalization to improve your response rates and ROI.
- Scale your campaigns: Easily scale your direct mail efforts without adding additional staff.
- Gain valuable insights: Track your campaigns in real-time and see which ones are performing best.
Who Should Use Flows?
Flows is ideal for any marketer or agency that wants to automate and improve their multi-touch direct mail campaigns. This includes:
- Marketing directors and managers: Streamline your direct mail process and free up your team to focus on other tasks.
- Nonprofit marketers and fundraisers: Increase donations and engagement with automated, personalized direct mail campaigns.
- Marketing agencies: Offer a new, high-value service to your clients and grow your business.
Get Started with Flows
Flows will be available on Wednesday February 26th, 2025, for subscribers to the Postalytics Pro and Agency plans. If you’re not a subscriber yet, or a user of the Free or Marketer plans, reach out to talk to the sales team. To learn more:
Flows FAQ’s
The short answer is that you’d use Flows to create workflows that are more direct mail focused or for “file based” campaigns (datafiles that don’t reside in your CRM). The longer answer is that you can do some really interesting things with both tools. You can actually use HubSpot and other CRM/Marketing Automation workflow tools to trigger a Postalytics Flow.
We provide a set of criteria and based off intent signals that help determine the kind of letter we send.
You have nearly an infinite number of ways that you can customize or personalize the mailers in these touchpoints. As long as you have a data set that can be ingested in the Flow, that data can determine what creative gets sent to whom.
In version 1, we have yet to integrate Flows with the Response Center. However, this is a planned enhancement that we are looking forward to rolling out in a future update. More advanced split testing automation will be coming down the line as well.
Yes! You can use Zapier to trigger a Flow, to trigger a “Send Mail” Action step and to receive updates from Flows with a webhook out. Additionally, we’ve submitted to Zapier for approval a new Postalytics/Zapier Action called “Enroll a Contact into a Flow”. We’ll be working with the Zapier team for approval on this and will publish it in a future update.
Yes! The Flows History tab enables you to see at the contact level who has received what Send Mail touches.
You can easily segment your audience based on a geographic region, or on any other criteria, as long as your data structure contains the data for the geographic regions at the contact level. Your segmentation is only limited by the data that you have. You can create unique campaigns with creative for each segment and use a Flow filter to direct Contacts to the right creative, or you can use the personalization features of Postalytics such as Variable Data, Variable Logic and Variable Images to designate specific creative blocks within the same Postalytics campaign/touch.
Yes, you can easily use an Automated File Campaign Flow to use datafiles captured using saved Audience criteria. We’re super excited to take this even further in the future with automation that will enable “polling” of saved Audiences on a regular basis and automatic dropping into a Flow.
Additional Updates
In addition to introducing Postalytics Flows, we’re also announcing several other updates, including:
- Updated Transaction Analysis Report: This report now provides more detailed information about your account purchases and sends.
- Updated API Docs and SDKs: The API documentation has been updated and SDKs are now available in six different programming languages.
- Print Network Expansion: The Dallas, TX production plant is now live for major formats and additional capacity is being added in the Southeast and West Coast.
- Product Roadmap: Postalytics is continuing to develop new features and formats, including website retargeting, Canva & Adobe Creative Cloud integration, matchback analysis, and more.
Introducing Postalytics Flows is Just the Beginning
Postalytics Flows is a game-changer for multi-touch direct mail. This innovative tool allows you to automate your entire direct mail process, from campaign creation to suppression list management. With Flows, you can save time and resources, improve campaign performance, and scale your campaigns.
We view Flows as a fundamental new capability of Postalytics that we plan to incorporate into many new features & products that are on the product roadmap. We’re excited to push direct mail marketing even further into the digital age with Flows!
If you’re looking to take your direct mail campaigns to the next level, Postalytics Flows is the answer.
About the Author
Dennis Kelly
Dennis Kelly is CEO and co-founder of Postalytics, the leading direct mail automation platform for marketers to build, deploy and manage direct mail marketing campaigns. Postalytics is Dennis’ 6th startup. He has been involved in starting and growing early-stage technology ventures for over 30 years and has held senior management roles at a diverse set of large technology firms including Computer Associates, Palm Inc. and Achieve Healthcare Information Systems.