Campaign Setup

Most of your ongoing work in Poplar happens on the Campaigns page. This is where you create, edit, launch, and monitor all of your direct mail campaigns.

The Campaigns page is your command center in Poplar. From here, you can create, edit, and track every direct mail campaign. At the top of the page, you’ll find an overview of your total mailed volume, total spend, and a date filter to explore performance by timeframe. You can also sort campaigns by in-home date, recent updates, or budget, and export a CSV for reporting.

Click the New Campaign button in the top right to create a new campaign, or click into an existing campaign to see the Overview, Results, Creative, One Time Sends, and Suppressions.

Campaign Settings

If your Poplar account is brand new, the only thing you'll see on the Campaign's page is the option to Create New Campaign.

Name, Description & Purpose

The campaign name should be unique and reflect your use case - adding the date of creation is recommended, if you plan on having multiple campaigns of the same nature.

The description should contain any key information such as trigger filters, notes on audience suppression, or anything relevant worth communicating to team members.

Setting a campaign purpose helps communicate even more context across team members. It also gives the Poplar team insight into campaign goals and use cases so we can better assist with strategy and results analysis.

Additional Settings

Address Enrichment (Email Retargeting)

Poplar's Address Enrichment feature matches email addresses to physical addresses. If you plan on passing only email addresses via trigger or when uploading a CSV list to be matched, Enable Address Enrichment when your campaign is created, or click the Settings tab in an existing campaign to adjust the settings. If you already have full address data for your target audience, leave this setting Disabled.

Running the match process costs an extra $0.07 per piece. You will only be charged if an append is successful, and will not be charged if a match can't be found. Under the campaign's History tab, the system will return append failed if it is unable to identify an address to match. If it's successful it'll change the status to mailing_queued.

Matched address data is not available for download and will be redacted from CSV mailing records downloaded from the History. The email addresses that found a match will be visible for tracking and attribution reports.

Holdout

Enable a specified holdout percentage to compare conversions between mailed and unmailed groups and easily analyze incremental lift. Given that mailings are triggered or launched individually and in real time, the holdout percentage is approximate. The holdout percentage you set is just the odds that any individual mailing will move to the holdout group.

We strongly recommend taking a holdout for campaigns sending at least ~5,000 pieces per month. If you're mailing at lower volumes, the holdout size is generally too small to get a high level of confidence in it, in which case this setting can be left Disabled.

We do not recommend manually taking a holdout from your audience segment, outside of the platform. It is best practice to set a holdout inside the platform to ensure the highest level of randomization, and allow for in-platform reporting of lift metrics.

Holdouts are taken after Address Enrichment so matched addresses can be checked against your opt out list. Any holdout requests are still charged for address enrichment, but the base print and mail fee is not charged when the mailing is in the holdout group.

Budget

For triggered campaigns, you have the option to specify a daily and/or weekly budget cap. Budget caps are approximate and your actual costs may end up lower or higher.

The reason for this is because you are only charged after specific events occur in the mailing stream. This means if more data appends succeed than expected, or if more mailing addresses you've provided fail to validate, you may see the actual costs come in above or below your budget.

Budget settings are ignored for One Time Sends. The cost of the send will be charged to your account credits, and the card on file if the balance exceeds your account credits.

Advanced Settings

Address Strictness

Address Strictness can be set on a campaign-level, which will override the global strictness set under Account Settings - this is what determines the Address Validation process. Varying rules are applied when uploading address data and when sending mailings to gauge the highest possible deliverability.

Attribution Window

You can set a custom attribution window when you create a new campaign. By default, Poplar uses a 90-day attribution window. This is the period of time for which you wish to credit a customer's transaction to the mailing. We recommend a minimum of 30 days to see the full scope of your results.

If you're sharing transactional data with Poplar, you may begin to see some results before your attribution window has fully passed. Since these number are considered incomplete, we suggest waiting until the attribution window has fully passed before evaluating the performance of your campaign.

National Change of Address Forwarding (NCOA)

NCOA is a dataset of change-of-addresses filed by individuals and/or businesses with the USPS. The database is maintained by the USPS and we are required by the USPS run a check for every mail piece we send. Learn more

How is NCOA accounted for when using Geolocations, Geofences, and Zip & State suppressions?

Our location and area-based checks are performed on the original address that you provide. These checks are run prior to NCOA, meaning if your recipient has moved, we do not account for the move in our checks.

However, if you are concerned about potentially mailing someone who has moved outside your delivery area(s), you can append the phrase " or Current Resident" to your recipient name field. This allows you to skip NCOA, meaning your mailer ultimately lands at the original address.

Return Address (Optional)

Some campaign use cases require or would benefit from the option to show a unique return address from the one listed for your Organization. Return addresses only appear on Letter creatives.

Suppression Settings

From the Suppressions tab you can control all campaign-level suppressions such as:

• Audience Suppressions: Select existing audiences to suppress.

• Zip Code Allowlist: Enter specific zip codes you want to mail to from your existing audience data.

• State Allowlist: Select specific states to allow or suppress (based on shipping or serviced areas).

• Saved Location Options: Apply saved location settings for brick & mortar locations.

• Geofence Suppressions: For even more custom Geolocation suppressions, set up an inclusion or exclusion geofenced area for an existing audience list.

Poplar cannot generate address data for custom locations based on the Geolocation or Geofence settings - you must already have mailing data for these to apply. For custom mailing lists reach out to [email protected] with the details of your campaign and target demographic, and an account manager will assist you with next steps.