I just finished creating a Direct Mail Campaign Manager in Podio and wanted to share it with everyone here. I put together a blog post laying out how I did it and what my general setup is. If you want a full blown tutorial on how I set it up, I also created that as well (just scroll to the bottom of the post..it's FREE). Let me know what you think.

When you are done with this Podio Tutorial you will have a complete working Direct Mail Management System. I recommend creating a dedicated Podio Workspace for this system. Workspaces are a great way to separate the different systems in your business. Since Direct Mail is different from my Lead Funnel System I broke them up into their own Workspaces.

To get a complete overview of this Podio direct mail system, go back and read my blog post about Podio Direct Mail Campaigns. Additionally if you want a deeper understanding on why I setup the apps the way I did then take a look at my blog post about The Proper Way to Setup Your Lead Flow in Podio.

Now it’s time to get at it. In this module I’m going to go over what you are going to be setting up in tutorials 2 through 11. Each section has a description, breakdown of the fields/actions that you will setup and finally a video that takes you through the entire setup.

Podio Apps

The Direct Mail System is broken up into 5 different Apps…

Letter Templates - Where all the Letters will be stored to be used in mailings

Mailings - Individual mailings of a campaign will be setup in this app

Campaign Templates - These templates will be where we organize the mailings

Campaigns - Your Direct Mailing Campaigns. Pulls together the leads and templates and runs the campaigns

Leads - Where your leads will be uploaded and stored

GlobiFlow Flows

Additionally there are 4 GlobiFlow process that are run against the Campaigns App that do the following tasks…

Campaign Setup - Assigns the Campaign Template and Schedules the First Mailing

Print Letters - Prints the current mailings letters by mail merging the assigned leads. Pdf file will be created and attached to the lead

Printing Mailings by Update Trigger - Triggered by a Category Field Change in the Campaigns App, this process calls the Print Letters Flow.

Automating the Printing Process - Checks each day if a mailing is schedule to go out and if so runs the printing process

The Podio side of this setup is very easy to do and shouldn’t be a problem for anyone. The GlobiFlow setup is where some people might get tripped up. I did my best to detail each step of the process so if you have copied everything I did then you should have no problem. Try not to make changes until you understand what is going on.