Integrating a powerful and user-friendly editor into the direct mail marketing service

The idea: Apply web-to-print tools for direct mail

PostPilot makes it delightfully simple to create, send, and track personalized postcard campaigns. This is a team of engineers, creators, and marketers that are passionate about helping entrepreneurs and businesses achieve greater success.

Matt Bertino is the founder of PostPilot. His family has been in the direct mail business for over 30 years. But it was only after years of using email tools to create dynamic, personalized campaigns that he realized how powerful the same tools would be if marketers leveraged them with direct mail. 

The challenge: Develop a powerful and user-friendly editor

PostPilot initially decided to try and create this editor on their own, but soon realized that it takes much more effort than they thought. At the end of the day, such an ambitious in-house project was distracting them from developing their core business.

The PostPilot team built four versions of their own web-to-print solution – no small undertaking to say the least. So, the decision was made to find a reliable partner that would relieve the PostPilot team from this daunting task and help them concentrate on other essential tasks.

The solution: Find the right web-to-print editor to integrate into their system

Personalization was key for the PostPilot team. In an environment where marketing is everywhere, personalization helps messages stand out. They needed an editor that could handle creating messages specific to individual recipients.

They also needed an editor with functionality that matched that of desktop graphics software – drag-and-drop, layers, snap lines, and multiple shapes are just a few of the tools that they required.

Lastly, they wanted a partner that could handle their volume at a reasonable price. Their send volume continues to grow and Matt didn’t want a service that wouldn’t scale with them.

The integration: An app connected to the Shopify storefont 

PostPilot is an application that connects to a Shopify storefront and loads user data to help their users organize triggered or bulk direct mail campaigns to whichever segment they want.

For example, their clients may set up a trigger to send a postcard with a promo right after a purchase is made, or send a Christmas promotion to all users who made a purchase last year. PostPilot essentially created an automated workaround that was already common in email marketing, but for direct mail.

These are some of the remarkable Customer’s Canvas features that made this integration possible:

API. Automation is the key to creating an easy and intuitive service. Customer’s Canvas uses a powerful API to ensure that the data flow from the Shopify database to the editor is seamless for users.

Adobe templates support. Merchants aren’t necessarily the best designers. At the same time, the quality of the design could make all the difference between a good and bad campaign, seriously impacting the ROI. In order to help their users send out stunning mail pieces, the PostPilot team prepared a gallery of predesigned templates for almost any imaginable occasion. All those templates were created using Adobe software, which was much easier for designers than learning a new proprietary format.

Image galleries support.  The PostPilot team also created image galleries with high-quality backgrounds and clipart sorted into separate thematic folders. Together with design templates, these assets provide users with all the necessary tools to create stunning campaigns that will hit their marketing and sales marks.

Variable data printing.  This technology was the centerpiece of the project. PostPilot’s developers took advantage of the Customer’s Canvas feature that enables you to insert variable data fields inline to make creating direct mail campaigns as easy as creating personalized emails. Those merge tags are then filled with data loaded from Shopify, and after the campaign is approved, Customer’s Canvas renders a pixel-perfect print-ready file for each piece of mail.

Print-ready files.  After submitting the campaign, the next step is generating print-ready files. PostPilot’s goal was to ensure that all those PDFs are good to go to print without any additional touchups that could cause delays in order fulfillment. The Customer’s Canvas image processing engine is purpose-built to achieve just that.

Easy integration.  Businesses can seamlessly integrate Customer’s Canvas as a personalization module into any third-party application. The PostPilot team was able to work with this flexibility and modular architecture to successfully integrate the editor into their software. The painlessness of the experience also significantly reduced their time to market.

The results: Less code to maintain, more time to focus on the product

When PostPilot made the switch, they were immediately able to reduce their codebase by orders of magnitude. This alone was a huge win. No more random bugs with the editor. No more feature requests. This mountain of avoidable issues is something they no longer have to deal with.