Postcards

Something you hold in your hand

Your customer gets forty emails today. She skims three of them.

In the letterbox lies a postcard. That one she looks at. She may even stand it on the sideboard, because the picture is good. And if her name is on it, and something that connects to what she bought from you last week, then it is no longer an advertisement but a gesture.

The reason hardly anyone does this has never been the effect. It is the effort: export addresses, build a layout in a design program, ask a printer, wait for a proof, hope the accented characters survived.

Caymland M4 turns that into a job of a few minutes.

Related capabilities with their own pages: Personalised letters for the classic letter and QR code generation for the way back from paper into the digital.

Design it in the browser

You drag image, text and shapes onto the card, move, rotate and scale them. No design program, no template file that somebody mails around.

• Design the picture side freely: your own photos, backgrounds, text blocks, shapes and colours.
• Fonts from your own identity, so the card looks like your company.
• A safety margin is shown, so nothing slips too close to the edge and gets lost in the trim.
• Templates for everything that recurs. Built once, after that only the motif and the text change.
• Folders, so the overview survives the thirtieth motif.

What you see is what gets printed

That sounds obvious and is anything but. With most tools you design in one environment and print in another. Between the two lie font fallbacks, line breaks and surprises that only become visible on paper.

Caymland M4 uses the same drawing engine for the preview in the browser and for the print file. The card is not rebuilt, it is drawn again, with the same fonts and the same text metrics.

The result: what is on your screen is what is on the card. Not approximately, but identically.

There is also a small property with a large effect: content cannot run off the card. The canvas is the card size. No text cut off because an address turned out longer than expected.

Rendering happens at print resolution, not screen resolution. Photos and type are sharp on the finished card.

Personalised, without gaps

A postcard wants customer data on it: first name, customer number, the event attended, the person looking after the account.

Each of those fields goes in as a placeholder and is filled when the card is produced. And because an empty field on an already paid-for card prints a gap nobody can correct afterwards, the system warns you before dispatch: it shows every placeholder without a fallback value, before anything goes to print.

A detail you only notice when it is missing. With an email you send a correction after it. With a thousand printed cards you do not.

Check first, pay afterwards

The biggest difference from digital channels: every card costs real money, and it does so before you know whether it lands.

So the first step is a check that costs nothing and sends nothing: how many of your contacts actually have a deliverable address?

The result is an honest number rather than an estimate. You see how many contacts are complete, which ones fail a rule, and exactly why. It works for a single contact, for a segment or for a sample, and it works before any contract with the postal service exists.

Anyone who has ever paid for a mailing where a third came back undeliverable knows what that number is worth.

Costs that cannot run away

Printed post is the one channel where a mistake costs money directly. A wrongly set filter does not send a superfluous email, it sends paid-for cards.

Two limits are built in against that:

• A ceiling per run, so a single job cannot get out of hand.
• A daily limit across the whole system, so several jobs together cannot exceed a budget either.

Whatever goes beyond the limit is skipped and recorded as such, rather than quietly printed.

On top of that, every card is recorded individually: to whom, when, with what status, at what cost. Pending, sent, failed, skipped. At the end of the month, what the channel cost is a query rather than a reconstruction.

Printed and delivered by the postal service

Dispatch runs through the official postcard service of Swiss Post. Printing, postage and delivery are handled there; you need neither a printer nor storage nor a franking machine.

For you that means: you design and you approve. What happens after that is a logistical matter you do not have to attend to.

What this looks like day to day

The cultural venue. After the last performance of the season, a card goes out with the motif of the new programme, to visitors with at least three visits. Personally addressed, naming the piece they last saw.

The specialist retailer. New customers receive a thank-you card two weeks after their first purchase, in a hand-written spirit. No offer, no promotion. The effect on the repeat purchase rate regularly surprises.

The association. Members who can no longer be reached by email receive the invitation to the general meeting on paper. For part of the membership that is the only channel that works at all.

The tourism region. Guests receive a card after their stay, with a picture of the region and a note about the coming season. The channel most likely to be kept.