Overview:: Before You start with Direct Mail – Emarsys

This feature is currently on general release for clients in the UK and Germany/Austria/Switzerland, for deliveries within the European Union.

If you are located outside these regions but interested in this product, please speak to your Success Manager.

Before you start creating and sending campaigns with Direct Mail, you should familiarize yourself with the resources and features available.

You can also refer to the documentation of our technology partner for more information:

As well as offering a price calculator and some ideas for campaigns, you can download templates for all the supported materials and pass these to your design team. This will ensure that your finished product fulfills all the requirements for postal automation and looks exactly how you want it.

Price calculator

Direct Mail has a very easy interface for calculating to the total price of your campaign.

Select Price Calculator on the left side menu or click on the icon in the middle of the screen.

Delivery country or region

Select the delivery country or region under Delivery Country: It can be Austria, Germany, or select Multi-country.

Select your product

Select your product and click Calculate mailing price.

You can click the + (Plus sign) to add multiple items.
Read the info notes appearing in the lower-right side of the product panels by hovering over your mouse cursor.

Product configuration

Select your options:

Print offset or Print digital
- Offset is the most cost-effective option for large print runs (>4,000) and gives better picture quality. Production time typically takes 4-5 days.
- Digital is a more cost-effective option for small print runs (<4,000). This is also more effective if you are using colored or image personalization, and the production time is shorter (1-2 days).
Recipients - Enter the number of contacts in the campaign launch list.
Mailing price - This calculates a total production and shipping cost and the netto price per thousand items (CPM) for your campaign. CPM is useful for comparing the cost of campaigns of different sizes.

Click Edit mail materials to go back to the starting page to edit the selected products.

Edit configuration

Click Edit configuration to specify further your selected products.

Remove product - Click the icon next to a product to remove it from the list.

You can now see all the details of the printed material. Where there are multiple options, select the one you prefer.

The price calculator is dynamic and will update with every change you make, so feel free to experiment with different combinations of products and settings.

The dynamic price calculator is meant to help you familiarize yourself with the costs of direct mailings. The exact price for each individual campaign is shown immediately in the right panel.

Use cases

We offer a number of different example scenarios along the whole customer journey where Direct Mail can make a difference, sorted by objectives. These will guide you towards making the right decisions when selecting the materials for your campaign.

Batch vs transactional campaigns

Depending on the entry points for your Automation Program, you can send batch mailings or trigger them individually.

Large batch mailings are the most cost-effective way to send Direct Mail campaigns.
Transactional mailings cost more per item, but you can carefully control the criteria required for a Direct Mail campaign to be triggered, and send highly relevant content at exactly the right time.

Design resources

We offer helpful features to guide your design team when preparing your campaigns.

Personalizing campaign data

You can personalize your content by accessing the data fields in your Emarsys contact database directly.

Emarsys will set up the connection and map the required fields during account creation.

The advantage of this approach is that you can include printed material as part of an omnichannel engagement strategy.

Required fields

The following fields are the minimum requirement for sending the printed material, so you must ensure that they are correctly filled in your contact database.

Last name
Street
House number
ZIP/Post code
City

In addition to these, you can use any other fields you like for personalizing the content. You will just need to make sure that the field names match the placeholders for the personalized content.

Personalised items include any of these:
- The recipient's address
- The recipient's name or other personal information
- Voucher codes that are unique per recipient

When using Direct Mail with Omnichannel Vouchers and the toggle is enabled that each contact can receive multiple codes, it is expected to see higher code consumption.
This occurs, because Direct Mail checks the contacts' details to ensure the most up-to-date information before printing. As a result, the same contact may receive more than one code within a few hours due to this check, but it is an expected behavior.