How to Send Postcards as Effortlessly as Email

From the article >"Everyone is unique, so you should make sure each individual mailpiece is customized as much as possible. Don't be afraid to use customer data to personalize and make a statement with your mailing."

"Dont be afraid to use customer data" seems like a dangerous general recommendation to make for an article recommending using the API to send postcards that are open to the world to read. Now I can't just discard spam mail adressed to "Resident", I'll have to read it all and make sure to shred it in case it has some sensitive data automatically encoded into the postcard?

From the article: "You can mail a single postcard and it will only cost you $0.70 all-in, no strings attached." That appears to be the cost penalty for sending postcards from an API. Less than half of that is postage.

There's still a direct mail industry, but it's all about getting the big discounts available if you send in bulk and pre-sort everything. It's a form of spam; most of it is discarded.

Worse, people who still pay any attention to paper mail are likely to send you back a reply on paper or call you. Now you need a mail room, a data entry operation, and a call center.

I struggle with this. On the one hand, direct mail is the bane of my daily existence. I get so many catalogs, flyers, etc. (mostly directed at previous owners, or just random names), that my recycling bin just can't handle it. Yes, I am actively unsubscribing from these things, but it's a slow one-off process.

On the other hand, between the Valpacs and the Red Plums, I do get occasional good things. A reminder that my sprinkler system needs to be winterized, or a card reminding me that my dogs are due for their vaccines. These things could be email-based, but a postcard is a great point of initial contact with a customer.

As a developer I am excited to see if I can use this service to send out party invitations, birthday cards, etc. Combined with a database of people's addresses and birthdays, I could automatically send postcards to lots of people, whereas doing it manually would mean that I would constantly forget.

I really like their API documentation pages (https://lob.com/docs), does anyone know if this was built using an open source project of some sort, or have any recommendations for one?

I'm working on an iOS Postcard app, so I tried them out. lob.com is a really great service, very easy to set up and get started. Do note that in my test it took over ten business days from ordering the card to deliver, so it is good for marketing postcards, but not good for transactional postcards (e.g., welcome to the service type things).

How do you get the physical address from the email address? Or you need them to have provided that somewhere else in the sales funnel?

You should send me these so I don't leak out of your conversion funnel.