Platform Overview

How to Use Poplar

Here you will learn the ins and outs of every page, tab, and setting offered within your Poplar Account. Familiarizing these concepts will enrich your programmatic mail journey, and prepare you to set up a wide range of mail campaigns.

Triggered vs. Batched Mailings

One of the first steps in campaign planning is deciding whether you want to set up a Trigger to automatically launch the mailer at a certain point in your workflow, or target a specific audience segment all at once with a batched mailing via the One Time Send process.

To set up Triggered Mailings, Poplar's Mailing API will need to integrate with your CRM/Marketing platform directly OR through a third-party connector (such as Zapier).

pageSupported Platforms

To send a Batched Mailing, head to the One Time Send tab within your campaign to begin the process; you'll be prompted to upload a segmented Audience File containing either email addresses or physical addresses.

pageOne Time Sends

A Campaign must contain Creative artwork before it's considered Active for a One Time Send or trigger configuration.

Dashboard

Welcome to your Poplar account! After completing the account onboarding process, you'll have immediate access to your new Dashboard.

From left to right you will see the navigation, a graph that will eventually show you spend & volume, monthly spend, and monthly mail volume. Once you begin building your first campaign, a list of Recent Campaigns will appear beneath the data graph.

Campaigns

Most of your work will be done from the Campaigns page. From here, you can create a New Campaign and see a list of existing campaigns in alphabetical order. At the top of the list you'll see the Total Spend, Total Mailed, CPA, ROAS, and Total Revenue across all campaigns.

The Reporting Window for these metrics can be adjusted using the calendar tool in the top right. The Columns tool to the right of the calendar allows you to select which reporting metrics you'd like to view for each consecutive campaign.

Active, Paused, or Archived status (archived campaigns are moved to the bottom of the list) is also shown, along with the date Last Mailed.

pageCampaign Setup

Overview

Click into a campaign to view the Overview page. From here you'll see the total number Mailed, the total Spend, CPO, ROAS, and Revenue. If you decide to share order data with the platform via CSV upload or API integration, attribution reports for the selected campaign will be visible at the bottom of the page.

To the right you'll see the campaign's status and the option to Edit or Pause the campaign. Edit Campaign allows you to adjust all the settings initially set when the campaign was created, which are also summarized below the unique campaign_id. The option to Archive a campaign will appear after the campaign has been Paused.

Creative

Under the campaign's Creative tab, you'll see the option to upload New Creative along with previews of existing creatives belonging to that campaign. File type, size, postage, and the number of custom merge tags are listed under each preview.

pageCreativespageUpload Creative

Click into a creative to find the unique creative_id and a summary of the Postage Type, Size, and custom merge tags with their default values. A Data Guide containing all required fields and merge tag values is available at the bottom of the page:

Edit Creative allows you to change the creative's name and postage type only. Design files and merge tag default values cannot be changed after upload; if you need to update these details, deactivate the incorrect creative and re-upload the updated version.

The Default creative is the one that will mail in the event creative_id isn't specified in a trigger or API call. To remove the Default tag, Deactivate then Reactivate the creative.

Due to recent policy changes and the COVID-19 pandemic, USPS has been experiencing backlog in certain areas of the country. We kindly ask our clients to keep this in mind when determining shipping speed and tracking mailers sent via Standard shipping. For time sensitive campaigns, we recommend mailing First Class when possible.

One Time Sends

From the campaign's One Time Sends tab, you can initiate and quickly launch a batched mailing or send yourself samples by clicking New One Time Send . After sending, a list of all the campaign's batched mailings will appear - featuring the date of send, audience size, whether the send is Pending or Processed, and who on your team initiated the mailing.

pageOne Time Sends

Whether the mailing is Pending or Processed, you can click into the send and see an overview of the mailing details and breakdown of the numbers by status. If your Audience File returned any invalid addresses, you can download a CSV record of the invalids and attempt to correct them for re-mailing.

The One Time Send feature allows a 30 minute grace period for cancellation before pushing to production. To bypass the grace period, hit "Send Now" when the countdown appears at the top of the batched mailing's overview page. Once the mailing begins processing, it CANNOT be stopped or reversed.

Suppressions

From the Suppressions tab you're able to suppress mailers to addresses that are targeted by other campaigns, addresses that fall outside zip code or state whitelists, or saved locations. Geofence suppressions, whether inclusive or exclusive, are activated under this tab as well.

History

After launch, the campaign's history tab becomes your greatest asset for tracking and viewing each individual mail piece. Here you can filter by date, mail state, or environment (Test vs. Production API). If you'd like a copy of the mailing history, a CVS record is available for download.

pageHistory

Click into a mailer to see the PDF preview with populated merge tags and a detailed summary of all data related to that specific piece; everything from recipient address and trigger source to a time-stamped event log as it moves through the mail stream.

To the right of the Event Log, you'll see Request Details containing the specific recipient data passed to Poplar.

Audiences

The Audience page is where you create and track audiences that contain core recipient data - ideal for suppression lists, and lists that do not contain columns for custom variables. Click into an audience to find the audience_id and the option to manually Add Member , or Upload CSV. When uploading a CSV, you'll have the option to map your column headers to required data before finalizing the upload:

pageAudiences

Do Not Mail List

Members in this list will be automatically suppressed across all campaigns. To programmatically add members to this list from your CRM/ESP/Marketing Platform, you'll want to integrate with our Do Not Mail API.

Customers (Orders API)

Contains an automatically generated list of customers based on transactions reported when Transaction Data sharing is enabled in Poplar's Shopify App or when integrated with our Orders API.

pageAttributionpageIn-Platform Reporting

Geolocation

Saved locations are used to restrict or personalize your campaign to specific geographic areas.

pageGeolocation

Locations

The Locations tab allows you to view, create, set a custom mile radius, and location-specific merge tag values for Saved Locations.

Saved Locations is a great tool to utilize for targeting customers within a certain radius of showrooms, brick and mortar stores, or any specific area of interest. Location-based merge tags can be set to populate on mailer's falling within a set location radius.

Zip Codes

Whitelist or target specific zip codes on an account-wide level.

States

Specify which states you'd like to include or exclude from campaigns on an account-wide level.

Geofences

Geofence perimeters can be established by tracing an area on a map, or by uploading a KML file containing coordinates of a target area. You can choose between only mailing in or not mailing to the selected area. A physical address and custom fields can be added and dynamically referenced in creative artwork.

pageGeofences