We’re constantly working on additional features to improve the Poplar platform, and we’ve made some big improvements in the past few months. We’ve added targeting capabilities to help you hit the right audience at the right time, along with additional ways to customize your mailers, and improvements to the QA process within the platform. We’ve also been adding more educational resources to give you insights into everything from creative best practices for DM to the similarities between direct mail and email.

Here’s a rundown of new features and updates we’ve added to the platform in the past few months.

Lookalike Prospecting

We launched our most exciting feature to date in late 2020 with custom Lookalike Audiences within the Poplar platform! You can now create prospecting campaigns to reach entirely new audiences and still use all the great features of the Poplar platform like matchback reporting, A/B testing, fast in-home times, personalized designs, etc. Poplar’s on-demand modeling creates a lookalike list based on your customers using multiple variables to target prospects with the highest likelihood to convert.

Minimums start at just 5,000 recipients and data is non-contributory. Expedited timing means your model is built in only 2-3 business days. Reach out to your account manager if you have any questions!

By using this feature, you accept the Poplar Terms of Use for Prospecting Data.

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Customer Ranking

‍As a marketer, you consider this question all the time for your campaigns: who should we target? For those who are new to direct mail - it may be hard to know! After getting this question from many of our clients, we decided to add a capability that would help you easily figure it out.

Customer Ranking introduces a new way to get the highest ROI possible from your Poplar campaigns - by targeting the existing customers who are most likely to make an additional purchase at this particular point in time.

Instead of mailing your entire customer file, or manually segmenting a specific portion to mail (e.g. those with the highest LTV or most recent activity), customer ranking allows you to simply pick a budget or circulation and let our modeling process find the best customers from your entire file to mail.

How Does it Work?

We use transactional attributes from outside your brand to find the customers in your file that are most actively purchasing related products and showing online activity that would signal a likelihood to transact again.

Questions? Chat with your Account Manager You’ll find our step-by-step guide in the documentation linked from the back end of your Poplar account.

Skip NCOA (National Change of Address) Forwarding

Did you know that Poplar handles NCOA forwarding behind-the-scenes for you? This means that if your recipient has moved, we automatically forward your mailpiece to their next known address. In some cases, however, it’s helpful not to forward a mail piece to the next address, especially if it’s outside your delivery area.

Now, you can limit any address forwarding easily in Poplar by turning off our NCOA feature - either in campaign settings or simply for a single One Time Send. When you turn this feature off, our system automatically adds the phrase "or current resident" after the original recipient's name. This ensures that even if the original recipient moved, the mailpiece lands at the address you put on the mailpiece - instead of being forwarded.

Geofencing

Using our geofencing tool, you are able to draw a custom-shaped area in Poplar (or upload a coordinate file) and toggle your campaign so that you only mail customers within or outside those areas.

You can use your geofences to personalize postcards and letters based on whether your customer falls within the geofence. Similar to geolocations, you can also attach an address to your geofence to support in-store promotions, drive curb-side pickup, and notify those customers about important store updates. Learn more about drive-to-store campaigns.

CSV Column Mapper

The new CSV Column Mapper should speed up your workflows and make the uploading process more seamless. When you upload your CSV address file in the One Time Send flow, you will now be able to map the columns to the fields required for mailing (e.g. match “First Name” column in your CSV file to the “First Name” field in Poplar). The mapper will also auto-map any immediately obvious fields for you. You no longer need to reformat or rename column headers. As long as you have the columns and they have headers, you can upload!

*The CSV mapper is not available for Audiences and Lookalike models.

Toggle Address Strictness in the One Time Send

We've added the ability to toggle between address strictness settings during the One Time Send flow. You can click and see how many customers are available to mail on each setting (Strict vs. Normal vs. Relaxed) and pick the setting you’d like to proceed with.

*Address strictness toggle is only available when you upload a set of addresses. All Audience sends will use the campaign setting.

Merge Tag Checker

We’ve added a merge tag checker towards the end of the One Time Send flow. This merge tag check will help you review whether your creative merge tags and your data source line up before you submit your mailing. This provides an extra level of QA to prevent mailings with any unpopulated custom merge tags.

Feel free to reach out to support@heypoplar.com or your Poplar account manager with any questions!