Creating PDFs and Word documents on the fly is great, but what if you want to mail those documents? You’d have to open each individual file, print the document, stuff into an envelope, write down the address, place a stamp, and finally put it in the mail. Think about how much time you’d spend sending 10-20 documents per day – probably close to an hour!
We’ve got a better solution for you with our new Delivery integration with Lob, a service that will handle printing and mailing documents automatically. With Lob you can send as many or as little documents as you need and they will print, address, stamp, and send your documents without you having to think about it. Think about all those bulk mailings you do or even the one off invoices, quotes, receipts, thank you’s, promotional letters, etc that your staff manually sends in the mail.
Setting up Lob is pretty straight forward and in this example we’re going to show you how to direct mail your customers and prospects with a promotional letter. To get started, we are going to build our letter using the Build Your Own document. We’ll also add field placeholders for the personalized information about the customer.
After we have the document all setup, we’re going to jump to the Delivery tab and setup the Lob integration. Go ahead and click New Delivery then click the Lob logo. For us to be able to send documents to your Lob account, we need API access. You’ll need to grab the API Key from your Lob account then copy & paste that into the settings inside Formstack Documents. Then we’ll setup the To and From addresses. Since we’re sending the letter from our business, we’re going to enter a static address for the From address, but for the To address, we’re going to setup new fields that will be pulled from our customer information
Once the Lob settings are complete, we are ready to send the letter! You can either hook this up to a service that collects your leads or you can upload a CSV file with all of your customer information. Let’s say you attended an event and you collected names and addresses of 300 potential customers. Simply get that information in a CSV file, upload it to Formstack Documents, and we’ll generate 300 different letters and pass them along to Lob for them to mail! To upload the CSV, click the Merge tab for your document then choose the Upload Data section and follow the steps from there.
Now, how’s that for easy? You didn’t have to address a single envelope or get a paper cut on your tongue to seal it! What other types of documents are you frequently putting in the mail that could be automated by Formstack Documents and Lob?