Die Post

Something you pick up

The inbox is full. Your email sits among forty others, and the best subject line wins a few seconds.

The letterbox is empty. Anyone finding something there that is neither a bill nor a flyer holds it in their hand and looks at it. Which is exactly why a postcard works at the point where the twelfth email achieves nothing.

The interface to Swiss Post's PostCard Creator makes the card a step in your campaign. Designed in Caymland, personalised like an email, printed and delivered by Swiss Post.

How a card comes about

Design. Front and back are built in the editor: image, text, small print. What you see is the card.

Personalise. Contact fields can be placed into text elements, exactly as in a mailing. Salutation, name, town, a field from your own structure.

Trigger. The card hangs off a campaign. It goes to the contacts who arrive at that point in the journey – not to a list somebody assembled beforehand.

The fallback value we discuss up front

An empty field in an email is annoying. An empty field on a card is printed, delivered and paid for.

So every placed field gets a fallback value. Without one, and with the field empty, the card prints a gap – and costs the same. The editor points this out as you place it, rather than letting you find out afterwards.

What Swiss Post can print, and what it cannot

Physical print has rules a screen does not. We build them in rather than let you hunt for them in an error log.

The character set applies to the back only. On the front you may design what you like.

Characters that cannot be printed are shown as you type, along with which ones they are. A card therefore fails in the editor and not at the printing works.

The address is the real hurdle

An email address is either there or it is not. A postal address can be there and still not suffice: the house number is buried in the street, the country is missing, a field is too long.

The interface checks every address against Swiss Post's rules before anything is triggered. The house number is separated out of the street line, because in databases that have grown over time that is almost always where it sits. Anything that cannot be cleanly separated is rejected rather than guessed – a wrongly guessed card costs the same as a correct one.

Know in advance how many you can reach. There is a check that runs your data against exactly these rules, without contacting Swiss Post and without triggering anything. It answers the question that comes before any decision: how many of our contacts even have a postable address? You can have that number before signing anything.

The daily limit

Every card costs postage and printing. Unlike an email, a mistake in segmentation is therefore immediately an amount of money.

So there is a hard ceiling on cards per day that applies across the whole instance. Once reached, sending stops rather than continuing. It is not a recommendation but a limit, and it deliberately sits above anything an individual campaign can request.

A quota per campaign can be kept as well. Once it is used up, no further card goes out.

What you need

On the Swiss Post side:

• Access to the PostCard Creator with a client ID and client secret
• Your campaign key

On the Caymland M4 side:

• Activate the integration and store the credentials
• Set the daily limit
• Design a card and place it in a campaign

You can run the address check before all of this. It requires no contract.

What this looks like day to day

The welcome. After the first order a card arrives, not another email. The difference is that it ends up on the fridge.

The win-back. Someone who has not opened an email for a year cannot be reached by email. Through the letterbox they can. A channel that not-opening does not switch off.

The dated occasion. Birthday, anniversary, start of season: the card goes out of the journey at the right moment, without anyone sending an address list to a print shop.