Direct Mail Credits work like stamps for your Smart Send and Triggered Drip Campaigns. What’s great is that you can purchase direct mail credits for mailings in the United States and Canada, for any of our supported formats, and save money with volume discounts!
Smart marketers take advantage of this by planning their Smart Send campaigns 6-12 months outs, estimate volumes for their Triggered Drip campaigns, and buy credits to save on per piece fees.
eduPostal can help you with planning your campaigns and maximizing your savings. If you’d like to speak with a direct mail automation expert:
Table of contents
- Direct Mail Credit “Queues” – A Bucket Of Credits For Each Format
- Direct Mail Credits for Mailings in the United States or Canada
- Buying And Managing Direct Mail Credits
- Direct Mail Credits Fund All Of Your Campaigns
- Custom Envelopes
- Learn More About Direct Mail Credits
Direct Mail Credit “Queues” – A Bucket Of Credits For Each Format
It is super easy to take advantage of volume discounts with direct mail credits. For each supported template format, you have a “Queue” or a bucket of credits that you fund for both first class and standard class mailing. As you can see in our eduPostal pricing, there are volume discounts available for each format. When you determine how many mailpieces you plan to send over the next 6-12 months using a particular format, you can simply buy credits and fund that particular Queue.
For example, let’s say that you plan to send approximate 10,000 6×11 postcards first class over the next 6 months, spread out over 3 Smart Sends and 3 Triggered Drip Campaigns. You simply purchase 10,000 6×11 postcard direct mail credits, and use those credits across your various campaigns. At the time of this article, the all in 6×11 first class per piece price for a Pro account is $.95 when purchased in low volumes. When you buy 10,000 6×11 first class direct mail credits, your all in per piece price is $.86. You save $900.00 when you buy the credits up front!
Direct Mail Credits for Mailings in the United States or Canada
eduPostal allows you to purchase Direct Mail Credits to use for your mailings within the US and Canada. Simply select either “United States” or “Canada” from the drop down menu in the upper right hand corner and then follow the remaining steps in this article.
If you’ll mail in both the US and Canada and want to purchase Direct Mail Credits for each, you’ll need to make two separate purchases, choosing the appropriate country for each purchase.
Buying And Managing Direct Mail Credits
It is easy to buy and manage direct mail credits in your Queues. If your Queue has no credits, you can simply enter the quantity that you want to purchase and buy them on the spot. If your Queue has existing credits, you can purchase new credits to further fund your account. The volume discounts are presented in each Queue.
To view the Queues for Canadian Direct Mail Credits, select Canada in the drop down menu to view those Queues.
Note – if your account is at either the Free or Marketer level, you can get better per piece pricing by upgrading your account.
Your Balance is the number of direct mail credits in your Queue at the current point in time. As your Smart Send and Triggered Drip campaigns process, they will reduce your balance. Note – Smart Send campaigns will reduce your balance when they are sent to the printer, and the final # of postcards being sent are calculated.
Reload Credits is a method of continually funding your Queue. You can choose from Automatic or Manual, and can modify that at any time. If you choose “automatically“, we’ll re-up your Queue with new credits when the account reaches 10% of the balance of your last purchase. For example, if you last purchased 10,000 6×11 first class credits and you selected to automatically renew, eduPostal will purchase another 10,000 credits when the balance hits 1,000, or 10% of the original balance.
If you choose to “manually” reload your credits, you must actively purchase new credits to keep your account funded (and keep any Triggered Drip campaigns activated/sending). eduPostal will email the account holder when the balance reaches 50%, 20%, 10%, and 5% of the last purchase as a reminder.
Reload Quantity will default to the amount of your last last purchase. You can modify this amount at any time.
Many customers choose to automatically reorder credits so that there’s no delay in processing their campaigns.
Direct Mail Credits Fund All Of Your Campaigns
Once you’ve purchased direct mail credits, you can use them for any Smart Send or Triggered Drip campaigns that are using the format you’ve purchased credits for. For Smart Send campaigns, you’ll have the option to pay via credit card for your mailer at the end of the campaign wizard, but if you’ve bought credits (and gotten a discount), it makes more sense to use credits from your account.
Triggered Drip Campaign Credits
Because Triggered Drip campaigns are triggered by your CRM or Marketing Automation, volumes can vary dramatically, so you must use direct mail credits. Again, it makes sense to consolidate your purchasing and buy direct mail credits for as many campaigns as possible, in order to maximize your discount. Note – your Triggered Drip Campaign can be setup and tested without Direct Mail Credits, however, once you are ready to switch your Triggered Drip Campaign to Live Mode, you’ll need to have a minimum of 100 credits in your format Queue. If you don’t you can purchase credits and fund your Queue right from the Campaign Dashboard.
Custom Envelopes
Custom Envelopes are our latest format offering and work in a similar way to our other credits when they are used and re-ordered. You can view balances, manage inventory, view pending orders, and place new orders all from the Direct Mail Credits Page, under the Envelope Inventory tab.
The key differences with Custom Envelopes
- You must create and proof your envelope before you can place an order. To learn more about creating custom envelopes, you can read the article How To Create Custom Envelopes.
- There is an order minimum of 2,500.
- Once the order is placed, it takes 2-3 weeks for printing and delivery before they are available to use in your campaigns.
You can read about the details of how to order custom envelopes in our article How To Order Custom Envelopes.
Learn More About Direct Mail Credits
At eduPostal, our goal is to make direct mail as simple and easy as possible. If you’d like to dig in and discuss how you might want to use direct mail credits to save money and streamline your campaigns: