Custom Envelopes, Unlimited Triggered Drips & More — Postalytics Update

We’ve surveyed our customer base, and heard from many prospects. The number one Postalytics feature request for the past year has been customized envelopes. While our standard white envelopes work great, you’ve told us you’d like more options to entice your audience to open that envelope!

They’re now available, along with many other new features and enhancements. Here’s a quick list of the changes to Postalytics in the latest update:

• Customized envelopes (for use with current letter templates)
• Unlimited Triggered Drip Campaigns for all Postalytics plans
• Triggered Drip credit purchase AFTER testing
• New 5,000 piece pricing tier & price drop for Letter Extra Pages
• Campaign Mail Events Report
• List mapping “Memory”
• Home page notification and credits panel
• Credits available listings per Triggered Drip campaign
• Infrastructure and scalability enhancements

Postalytics Update Webinar – Custom Envelopes & Other Updates

We hosted a webinar on February 11th, 2021 where we reviewed how the new custom envelopes features work along with other key parts of this update. You can watch it here:

Customized Envelopes: “The Subject Line Of Direct Mail”

A very savvy direct mail pro recently gave us the above quote. It really says it all — the messaging you add to the exterior of your envelope acts like the subject line.

With this release, you have the ability to design, order and inventory an unlimited number of custom envelope templates for use with direct mail letter campaigns.

As you can see, your designs are created in the editor, just like postcards and letters. You can use both the front and back of the envelopes to add text, graphics and images.

Custom Envelope Design Workflow

From a design perspective, the workflow for custom envelopes is very similar to our other postcard and letter formats:

• You can build envelopes from scratch in the editor, build offline by uploading a full background image, or use pre-built template (we’ll be adding these over time)
• The editor will block out the areas that you need to keep content away from – the single window, postage area and the envelope border
• You will need to proof custom envelopes the same way that you use the Proofer to finalize other formats

What’s different about the design workflow?

• At this time, there’s no personalization (variable data or variable logic) on the customized envelopes
• Likewise, you cannot add tracking (pURLs or personalized QR Codes) to the envelope

Custom Envelope Ordering & Campaign Workflows

The ordering process for custom envelopes is a bit different. In order for you to be able to maintain an unlimited number of different envelopes in inventory, they need to be ordered and “pre-printed” and entered into the inventory system of our print partners.

We’ve added Custom Envelopes as a new type of Direct Mail Credit. They work the same as our other credits when they’re being used and re-ordered. With the initial orders there are some new concepts involved in the ordering workflow:

• There’s a minimum quantity of 2,500 custom envelopes in an order
• Orders take 2-3 weeks to fulfill. During this time they’re considered “Pending”
• You’ll be notified via email when the order has been fulfilled and can be used in letter campaigns
• A small quantity of your envelopes (+-2%) may be used to for the setup and testing of your campaign print run.

Once your order is available, you can use your inventory in as many campaigns as you’d like. The letter campaign workflow has been updated so that you can choose between the standard, dual window white #10 envelope, or any custom envelope that you’ve ordered and has enough inventory to handle your list.

For a full breakdown of how custom envelopes work, check out the help docs:

Unlimited Triggered Drip Campaigns Marketer And Free Plans

When we first released Postalytics a couple of years ago, we thought our revolutionary Triggered Drip Campaigns would be a feature that only larger organizations would want to use.

We were wrong. It’s become very clear that organizations of all shapes and sizes would like to use lots of automation to trigger lots of individual mailers.

Now, all Postalytics plans include unlimited Triggered Drip Campaigns.

Buy Credits After Testing Triggered Drips

Another great change in this release involves the workflow associated with triggered drip campaigns. Previously, you were required to buy at least 100 direct mail credits in order to finish creating your triggered drip campaign.

Then we added our unique “Test Mode” that enables you to do a full end-to-end test of your automation tool and Postalytics triggered drip. But we didn’t change the purchase process, so you needed to purchase before you could test.

Now, you can use Triggered Drip Test Mode as much as you like, without requiring a purchase of credits. When you flip the campaign to “Live Mode”, you’ll then be prompted to buy credits, if you don’t have them already.

New 5,000 Piece Pricing Tier

Another tweak we’ve made after discussion with clients is the addition of a 5,000 – 9,999 per piece/direct mail credit pricing tier. We learned that this is a sweet spot for many clients who are buying direct mail credits, so we’ve responded with a tier to make it easy and affordable.

Speaking of plans and pricing, we also dropped prices on our Letter format Extra Pages. As we scale our volume and get better pricing from our print partners, we pass it along to you.

New Report: Campaign Mail Events

We’ve created a new report that gives you insights into your mail campaign printing and mailing activity over a period of time.

The Campaign Mail Events Report is designed primarily for Triggered Drip Campaigns (but can be used for Smart Sends too also). Now, it is very easy to quickly determine how much mail you’ve sent from a campaign, as well as other printing/mailing “Events”.

Mail Events are data that we capture from the printing process as well as from the USPS IMB system. Do you want to know how many mailpieces were “Created” by a campaign yesterday? How about the details of your “Returned To Sender” IMB scans last week? These are now at your fingertips with the Campaign Mail Events Report.

Automatic List Mapping & “Memory”

Another great suggestion from our users has resulted in changes in the way that we handle list import mapping. Users have taught us that often, lists are imported the same way over and over again. Now, the list import tool will speed up the mapping process for these use cases.

.CSV and Excel List Imports

With this update, file based list imports now have “auto-mapping” features.

First, if you use the precise names of the standard Contact Record fields as your column headers, these columns will be recognized, automatically mapped and labeled “green”.

Next, all extra columns that are not automatically mapped to standard Contact Record fields will be mapped as Variable Data fields. If you do not want to import these columns, you can simply use the new “Clear Selections” buttons.

If you repeatedly import .CSV or Excel files with the exact same columns, we recommend modifying your column headers to match up with our Contact Record field names. If you do, the import process will fly along very fast!

CRM List Imports

For list imports from supported CRM’s (as of this writing, HubSpot and Salesforce), in addition to automatically mapping standard required fields, we’ll “remember” mappings from your last import.

This can be a huge time saver when importing lists with many variable data fields from huge CRM databases. Rather than hunting and pecking through hundreds of custom CRM fields to find your mapping, if your list and creative is following the same set of variables, these will be automatically mapped for you.

Home Page Notification Panels

We’ve made a slight modification to the Home Page to help keep you informed about important information about your account.

On the upper left side of the Home Page, there are now two small icons. The top icon is reserved for communicating important information (like when we update the software like this).

The lower icon is to provide a shortcut to see your available direct mail credit balances. You can click on any of the balances and be brought immediately to that “credit queue” to review and/or purchase new credits. If you are running low or are out of credits, they’ll be shaded red, so that you know that your campaigns that use those credits are depleted.

Triggered Drip Credit Balances In Campaign Listing

We’ve also changed the Campaign Listing page for all Triggered Drip Campaigns to show the available direct mail credit balances for all Triggered Drip Campaigns. That way, at a glance, you know exactly how many credits you have available for your campaigns.

If you’ve run out of credits for a campaign, we’re now indicating this with a bright red button.

More Infrastructure And Scalability Updates

With every release now, we’re modifying the early Postalytics code to be able to handle our exponential growth. These changes don’t result in obvious features, but are designed to help you stay confident that Postalytics will be there for you when you need it.

Direct mail automation is turning out to be very popular. We love having to invest in these infrastructure and scalability updates!

Your Ideas Really Help!

Thanks to everyone for their great suggestions on how we can improve Postalytics. We love to hear from you, and we’re excited to continue to find ways to reduce the friction associated with direct mail marketing.

If you have any thoughts or ideas you’d like to share — please do! Your feedback has been a very important part of the way we’ve shaped our product roadmap. You’ll be seeing many more updates in the coming months as a result of user input.