Automated Postcard Mailing

TABLE OF CONTENTS

REQUEST A DEMO

Automated Postcard Mailing

Postcard marketing was always among those marketing forms that bear excellent results. Even in today’s time, when digital interactions have become part and parcel of everyone’s lives, it continues to impress customers and prospects and get them to respond. However, it is undeniable that previously, any type of direct mail marketing was costly, difficult to conduct and track. But things have changed now. Automation has helped marketers streamline their direct mail activities and avail a whole set of advanced capabilities.

Automated postcard mailing does not only make direct mailing easier and efficient but helps marketers get a better response and conversion rate. In this blog, we will discuss more automated postcard mailing, its benefits, importance, and ways to optimise it.

Reasons to Automate Postcard Mailing

There are a number of reasons why you should use automated postcard mailing. While postcard marketing has survived all the modern digital marketing strategies and is still prefered by marketers, it is important to do it right. At this point, automation comes in to combine one of the oldest offline marketing forms with new technology.

Postcards are impressive direct mail items. They can easily create an impact on the minds of your recipients and persuade them to complete the CTA. Plus, the tangible nature of direct mail that allows people to see and touch it only adds to its benefits. Unlike other mail items, postcards do not need envelopes. It can be tricky to design postcards as the mailing address, return address, keep clear zone, and stamps are all printed on them. Automated postcard mailing solutions like PostGrid enable you to design eye-catching postcards and print them in the right way.

Automation also helps marketers save plenty of time spent researching vendors and negotiating prices. PostGrid’s postcard print and mail API offers all-in-one rates for everything from designing to mailing. Moreover, it can help you get huge postal discounts by bulk mailing, presorting, and several such methods.

Verified addresses, accuracy, timely delivery, and tracking capabilities are some of the other reasons why you should automate your postcard mailing effort.

Personalise Your Postcards and Build Segmented Mailing Lists

Sending out general postcards with not even the recipient’s first name cannot help you gather a lot of responses. Such general marketing strategies are often failed because people do not feel the need to respond to these non-personalised postcards. On the other hand, personalisation can flip the entire game for you. It can grab your recipients’ attention quickly and make them feel special. With the help of variable data printing offered by automated direct mail solutions like PostGrid, it has become easy to personalise every single postcard among thousands. You can integrate PostGrid’s postcard print and mail API into your CRM and use certain demographics and factors for personalisation.

As much as you personalise your postcards, it is recommended that you also first segment your mailing lists and target a specific audience that fits your buyer persona. Again, targeting certain demographics and psychographics such as age, income, gender, marital status, buying habits, and preferences can help you build targeted mailing lists. PostGrid can help you build such mailing lists from scratch.

Gone are the days when you printed the same thousand postcards and mailed them out to anyone in the hope that they would be interested in your brand and respond to your mail. With automation, you can determine your prospects beforehand and then reach out to them with the most convincing message possible.

Include Infographics, a Relevant CTA, and an Exciting Offer

Coming to the contents of your postcard, there are some basics. Marketers should take care to include an easy and upfront CTA that recipients are willing to complete. A smart trick is to lure recipients into completing the CTA by adding an undeniable offer. Hence, both the CTA and offer should complement one another and support the common cause of getting maximum responses.

Having said that, it is often difficult to determine the CTA that can be included in your postcard content. While some companies jump straight to the sales part and ask their prospects to purchase, that can sometimes be a buzzkill. Postcard marketing works best when it is used as a means of lead generation and not direct sales. Therefore, asking people to scan a QR code, visit your website, set up a demo session, or something similar can be a good CTA, especially when you are interacting with someone for the first time.

Similarly, your offer should be something exciting and interesting to your audience. Extra credits, discounts, and some other benefits should do the task.

Another thing to note is that creativity is appreciated; after all, your postcards should be attention-grabbing and attractive. Recipients should want to read them. You can add some relevant images and infographics for doing so.

A/B Testing and Mail Tracking Abilities

Out of all the amazing features that automated postcard mailing offers, testing and tracking are the most beneficial ones. They help you analyse your postcard marketing activities and also guide you on how to improve and do better.

Before conducting a large-scale campaign, it is best to send out a few mail items and test their performance and effectiveness. If this test campaign doesn’t work, you would have saved yourself a lot of time, effort, and money. Moreover, you can make the necessary modifications and move ahead. A/B testing allows businesses to make the right decision. Marketers can test different designs, colours, graphics, and copy to check what works the best for their brand. They can get several variations to compete against each other and choose the top-performing one. This way, marketers can assure their campaign success prior to conducting it.

Talking of tracking, you first need to determine how you want to track responses and engagements. There are several ways to track responses like adding a QR code, pURL, dedicated phone number, unique email address, redeemable discount codes, and so on. These tracking factors can help marketers have a clear view of all the responses, which they can follow up on and drive conversions.

Through these ways, you can easily combine offline and online marketing. This combination allows you to tap on all of your conversion chances and opportunities. Multiple touchpoints mean an extended database, which you can make complete use of through automated postcard mailing.

API Integration

API integration offers more than one benefit to direct mail marketers. Firstly, they can skip through the part where manual data entry is required. The integration helps in speedy data import useful to personalise mail items. Secondly, they can integrate with any marketing platform such as Shopify, Zoho, Magento, Hubspot, and more. You can start printing and mailing postcards right from your own preferred platform.

With the Zapier integration, marketers can connect with over 1,600 apps to gather data. The process of integrating PostGrid’s automated direct mail API with your CRM is relatively simple and quick. It makes sending direct mail as easy as sending emails.

Conclusion

Automated postcard mailing is easy, efficient, productive, and highly result-bearing. Through automation, you can personalise postcards, segment mailing lists, test different postcards for their features, track and measure results, get campaign analytics, and improve your overall direct mailing journey.

With bulk mailing capabilities, international coverage, address verification, pre-built templates for speedy designing, and no minimum volume requirements, PostGrid offers excellent automated postcard mailing solutions.

Ready to Get Started?

Start transforming and automating your offline communications with PostGrid

SIGN UPREQUEST A DEMO

The post Automated Postcard Mailing appeared first on PostGrid UK.

Via https://www.postgrid.co.uk/automated-postcard-mailing/

source https://postgridunitedkingdom.weebly.com/blog/automated-postcard-mailing

What Are Geocodes and What Is Geocoding?

TABLE OF CONTENTS

REQUEST A DEMO

Understanding Geocodes and Geocoding

There are millions and billions of addresses around the world. It can be really difficult to map physical locations so that companies and marketers can get a view of all the addresses altogether. With the help of mapping, businesses can form marketing plans and reach out to their customers smartly and accurately. Hence, there ought to be a way to do so. Apparently, geocoding was introduced, and the answer came clear as a bell.

Geocoding is a process that takes text-based descriptions of places as inputs and returns their geographic coordinates as outputs. It converts an address or a place name into latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates. Geocoding is primarily used for identifying different locations on the face of Earth that can be presented on a map.

Geocodes are the set of coordinates returned through geocoding. They can help businesses track addresses, streamline their operations, and widen their reach.

Geocoding Accuracy

How accurate is geocoding? Perhaps, the better question to ask is how accurate it can be. There is no one answer for both these questions as there are different types of geocoding that are accurate at different levels. As a matter of fact, the more accurate the geocodes, the more is the cost.

Postcode Level Geocoding

There are usually 15 addresses under every postcode—representing the postal delivery route that covers those addresses. Postcode level geocoding helps you locate the approximate centre of these routes so that you can get a rough idea of where the concerned addresses are located. Hence, these geocode are accurate only at the block level.

Though not completely precise, geocodes returned by postcode level geocoding can enable businesses to conduct door-to-door marketing and also identify relevant postcodes using demographics and geographics that define their customer profile.

If you only need to know the approximate pinpointed location of addresses and not the exact rooftops, this type of geocoding can work well for you. Moreover, it is far less costly than rooftop geocoding.

Interpolation Geocoding

In simple words, interpolation is a method through which known or established values are used to find out other unknown values that are in sequence with them. We all must have heard about it at school, but now is the time to put it to use. This is used to find out address geocodes by using known data points that happen to be on the same street or even block.

For example, there is a street named Shaftesbury Avenue. Now imagine that the street ends with an intersection at the starting and ending points both. Suppose you already have two geocodes at either point that is nearby to the addresses you want to know about. A and D are the starting and ending points, respectively. Interlocation geocoding uses these already known points to determine points B and C that exist in the middle.

This geocoding type assumes that all addresses are located at regular intervals from each other and, in common, repetitive patterns, which is seldom the case. Therefore, such geocodes are only street-level accurate.

Parcel Centroid Geocoding

Parcel centroid geocoding is the process of finding geocodes of the centre of a property or parcel. Basically, it uses the parcel’s known boundaries, finds its centre, and returns geocodes for that centre. Hence, they are known as “parcel centroid” geocodes.

It is much more expensive than interpolation and postcode geocoding because the method requires additional data to make the necessary calculations. Unfortunately, it is still not precise.

The reason for its inaccuracy is that houses are not always built in the centre of parcels, especially in the case of irregular and large properties. For large properties, it is better to use other types of geocoding.

Rooftop Geocoding

Undoubtedly, rooftop geocoding is the most precise type. It is therefore also expensive. Knowing the exact location of an address at the rooftop level is of great importance to many industries, from healthcare to real estate. All the other types of geocoding can only give you estimates, which could vary widely.

Rooftop geocoding starts off as parcel centroid geocoding and then uses additional data points to calculate and refine geocodes at the rooftop level. Rooftop geocoding works best when used with address verification solutions like PostGrid.

Determining the Accuracy pf Geocodes That You Require

As we have already established, postcode and interpolation geocoding are relatively less priced. But, they also provide less precision. Businesses working on a tight budget can consider using them if their operations do not demand cent per cent accuracy.

On the other hand, parcel centroid and rooftop geocoding can cost you a lot, although only one of them offers precision. It is safe to say that parcel centroid geocodes are not exactly worth the price. Hence, if you intend on investing in precision, you can pay a little more and go for rooftop geocoding.

Geocoding Applications

Geocodes are used for far more things than we can even mention. Whenever someone wants to know the location of an address, geocodes come into the picture, making it widely used.

• Supposedly, you are the marketing manager of a bank and there are altogether 15 branches all over the city. You need to get 400,000 personalised letters printed and mailed as part of a campaign. In each of the letters, you need to mention the address of the nearest branch. How will you do that? In this case, you can just make use of postcode geocoding to identify the branch closest to each of the addresses in your mailing list. Restaurants, boutiques, hospitals, and other businesses with various branches or franchises can benefit from postcode geocoding significantly.
• Let us take another example of yet another application. Insurance underwriters need to conduct risk assessment examinations before quoting. If a particular underwriter needs to determine the distance of an apartment from a nearby firework factory, geocoding can come into use. In such cases, it is advisable to only use rooftop geocoding. Other types can make you believe that there is no risk at all and the factory is located at a safe distance when the reality could be far from it.
• Geocoding is perhaps the most used by telecommunication companies. From checking their network coverage to building signal towers, geocoded can help them immensely. Using rooftop geocoding, they can determine residential and business areas where the signal should be strong, along with empty grounds and parking lots where poor networks can work just fine.

Reverse Geocoding

Reverse geocoding is the exact opposite of geocoding. Geocoding converts text-based addresses into geographic coordinates, whereas reverse geocoding converts geocodes into text-based addresses. It is helpful when you have the coordinates of a particular location and need its physical address in words.

Reverse geocoding is not as popular as geocoding because the returned results are not always perfect. These addresses might not even be parsed and standardised enough for you to understand. However, you can use PostGrid’s address validation API to complete, parse, standardise, validate, and verify addresses.

Google’s Geocoding Services

When we talk about Google, we think of it as a “know-it-all.” However, if there is one segment where Google is lagging behind, it is their location services. Be it address verification or geocoding. Their services are not quite helpful.

Google can help you locate addresses as pinpoints on a large map, but the geocodes returned by them are never precise. Their mapping services work just fine and can help you get to a particular address by providing you with the right route. The biggest catch is that Google can return geocodes even for addresses that do not even exist. Hence, their results are far from reliable.

Conclusion

Most companies that use geocoding aim to optimise their mailing activities. PostGrid can help you with the same through their automated direct mail and address verification solutions. We use rooftop geocoding to verify your addresses and assist you with all your print and mail activities.

Ready to Get Started?

Start transforming and automating your offline communications with PostGrid

SIGN UPREQUEST A DEMO

The post What Are Geocodes and What Is Geocoding? appeared first on PostGrid UK.

Via https://www.postgrid.co.uk/what-are-geocodes-and-what-is-geocoding/

source https://postgridunitedkingdom.weebly.com/blog/what-are-geocodes-and-what-is-geocoding