Shaun Whynacht walks through Canada Post's Snap AdMail, a direct-mail service that lets small businesses target specific neighborhoods. You can reach 430 local businesses with a 5.5 × 8.5 flyer for $595 ($1.19 per address), using free templates or paying $100 for design. Pair it with a specific landing page URL to track results.
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Hey, it's Shaun Whynacht with Blue Cow Creative. Thanks for joining me here. I want to talk to you today about direct mail. Now, we are in the world of digital communication and digital marketing, but direct mail is still the number one most converted form of marketing. Now, by direct mail, if you're not familiar with what I mean by that, that is mailing somebody through the, the traditional mail system. So if you're in Canada, Canada Post, or the United States Postal Service. So sending out your message to a targeted group of people through the mail, so they physically have to touch that mail and interact with it. Now what I want to show you today is a service that Canada Post has rolled out this week, and I got the email yesterday and I checked it out, and I'm really, really quite excited about it. It's called Snap AdMail. Now this is a complete game changer in my mind for small business. Now let's rewind a bit and talk about what was involved prior to this type of service. If you're going to do any kind of direct mail with Canada Post, you'd have to design, you'd have to print, you'd have to go into the postal service and find out how many businesses or residents or apartments you were going to target within an area and provide them with your printed material that they would then Distribute. Now what they've done is they've taken it completely online. So if you go to CanadaPost.ca, the easiest way to find this is just click on the little search icon on the top and type in here Snap AdMail. Now you're going to come up with, with some links and just click on one. Now obviously this could be a different time when, when you're looking for the search, but this is what we're going to look for. And you can see here in this one here that if we add the Snap AdMail to the end of the URL, just like it is right here, it'll take us right to that page, or maybe not. So let's just circumvent this. Let's do a Google search. You know, Murphy's Law, when you're trying to do a demo, then it's not gonna work. So they did change it, it is canada-post.ca/sam. So we're gonna click on this. Now here it is, there's a video, you can watch the video on it, but I'm gonna show you how this all works. So I'm gonna go ahead and click Try It Now. It's going to pop up and it's going to ask you really two questions. What's your street address and what's your postal code? So I'm going to put in the one here for our office. We're on Lovett Road and here's our postal code. And really what it wants to do is it wants to look at the map and we can get rid of the little may I help you thing at the top. And it says here your routes are ready. So it's going to go and look at Canada Post and look at the different mail routes within your area. So you see here on a map, you know, we are, we're in probably, if we look on this map here, we are, our office is about right there, okay? So we've got all these different areas that we can check and look at. So if you want to check the area, you just click on it, it's going to turn blue, it's going to show you on the right-hand side the selection summary. Now they break it down by apartments, houses, farms, and businesses. Now if you're a business and you want to market to other business owners, you can just turn off these ones. You can go ahead and select different routes, and each time you click, it does add, it's cumulative, and it's gonna add on here. So we can go ahead and click and add all this stuff on here. Do, do, do. Let's just pick as many as we can just for the sake of this demo. There we go. So within this area of the map, and obviously you can move the map around and look in other areas, if I wanted to target businesses, there's 430 businesses that I could target within these different mail routes, which is great for me because this allows me to put my message in front of just those businesses. So we're going to go ahead and we're going to click Save and Continue. It's going to come up here and call— name it because you are creating an account here. So we're going to call this, um, Valley Business. You can always go back and edit this later. Hit Save and Continue. There we go. Wouldn't let me because I did this before and I had the same thing. So now you're going to create an account. So either you're a returning customer or a new customer. So I'm going to go ahead and log in. Hopefully that's my password. All right, so we're in. Now how this all works is they take care of, you know, if you want to go this route, they take care of the design, the printing, and the distribution. So these are all-inclusive pricing. So based on what I picked, so for example here, if I did a 5.5 by 8.5 flyer, And it says here flat size, half folded to 5.5, so 8.5 by 11 is the full size open up. Includes printing, postage, and delivery to the post office. So if I selected 430 businesses, which I did, reach them for a single drop of $595. That's $1.19 per address. Now we can see other options here. Postcards, if we want to do a 6 by 12 postcard, then obviously the price is a little less, and a 6 by 9 even less. From there. So if we wanted to do that, then we can go ahead and click Order Now. It's going to go in, it's going to, going to ask you some other, other things. So do you want any extra copies for your office? And they will send those to you. If you're going to do your own design, it costs zero, you know, extra on there. Free templates from a free customizer by our design, uh, by their designers. So you can use some professional templates that are in there. Or you can use a professional design service and they're gonna charge you $100. So if you do work with an existing designer, then you can create those files. You just upload the files here. Obviously one is for the front, one is for the back, and you hit continue and then move forward. Now we don't have any files on here for this demo 'cause we're not actually gonna be doing this, but that would be the next step to go through that. And then you place the order and then it's off and done and off to the races. And your postcard, your flyer will be sent out to those distributed addresses. Now what I'm going to do, if it let me come back here, is I want to explain a bit more about the philosophy behind direct mail targeting. Now I'm not sure it's going to let me come back to that. Let's just see here if I can get back to the map, and I can right here. Okay, perfect. So what I strongly suggest is that you don't take on everybody because you're really gonna be trying to throw everything to the wall and see if it sticks. I strongly suggest that you look at targeting specific areas. So for example, if I was to do a direct mail piece to businesses in the Valley, I know my Valley is broken up in my immediate area into different towns. We've got Berwick over here, we've got Colebrook area, we've got Kentville, we've got New Minas, and we went further up, we'd have Windsor. Now it would make more sense to me to get the attention of those people that I'm targeting by making my ad mail that comes out to them be specific to their area. So if I was doing something like along the lines of, of video marketing, so how video marketing can help your business would be a generic type postcard I could send out with some information about our company and what we do. Now if I wanted to make it more specific, I could make a spin on that. How video marketing can help your Berwick-based business. Now I've made it unique to the demographic I'm going to send to. I could do one mailing just to the businesses in Berwick. I can change it up and do another one for, for New Minas, for Colebrook. You see what I'm getting across here is make sure that the target area that you're picking, how unique and how specific can you make your message that goes out to them. Think about that. But this service from Canada Post, in my opinion and probably in many other marketers, is a complete game changer when it comes to that ad mail service because you can then take your, your digital products, your online presence, take it offline, send it out through the mail system, and get them to come back and deliver on that promise. So if you've got a service, you're going to send it out by the mail, give them a specific URL where they can come back to your website to a landing page, opt in for some more information, maybe call you. But make sure what you're sending them has a distinct message and tells them exactly what you want them to do. That's my talk today on direct ad mail marketing and this great Snap Ad Mail service from Canada Post. Check out our website at bluecowcreative.ca when you got a chance. We've got blogs on there and helpful information just like this one. Or at the end of the video, we'll show you how to connect with us socially. Thanks for talking. I'm Shaun Whynacht. We'll talk to you soon.
