Constant Contact Labs Developer Blog
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Postcard Posted Friday, February 19, 2010 4 Comments
Let’s continue the theme of Cool Stuff Week-related posts. Brendan’s told us about OpenSocial, Huan has compared Rails and Django, and I’m happy to talk now about one of my CSW projects. It’s a prototype iPhone app I’m calling Postcard, and I think it’s a big step towards addressing one of our customers’ most pressing problems.
Constant Contact‘s customers are busy. Really busy. They’re running a business, taking orders, calling customers, prepping quotes, tracking finances, communicating with employees and partners, and, oh yeah, creating their own marketing communications. We’re here to help out as much as we can, and we realize that time is an incredibly precious resource. That’s why one of Constant Contact Labs’ main projects is QuickView for iPhone (and, soon, QuickView for Android) - if our customers can keep tabs on their marketing communications on-the-go, that saves time.
Over the last few months we’ve received a lot of great feedback on QuickView for iPhone, and although we’re doing our best to keep up, one request has given us pause: our customers want to create content on-the-go. They want not only to monitor the status of already created communications, but also to build new communications while away from the computer. We’re stumped: would you really want to type a newsletter’s worth of text into your phone? How would you even do that?
A Newsletter in 140 Characters
Postcard is an attempt to address this customer need. It reframes the content-creation problem on a mobile device: instead of worrying about how to build a newsletter like we do on the computer, let’s consider this an opportunity to create a new kind of content on a new kind of platform.
Okay, well, what’s a person at a computer good at?
- Creating and editing large amounts of text.
- Designing complex visual layouts.
That sounds like a newsletter: deep and informative, but somewhat time-intensive to create.
What’s a person with a mobile device good at?
- Sending short, spontaneous messages.
- Capturing local context.
It sounds like marketing communications from a mobile device should be less like a newsletter, and more like a postcard.
The Prototype
The Postcard prototype centers around the idea of a short, template-based newsletter consisting primarily of an image. The image is the content; there’s room for a title and a short paragraph of text, but that’s it. The image and text are dropped into one of a few selectable templates, the image is uploaded, and off it goes to a contact list. Start to finish, right on the mobile device.
Here’s a video of the prototype:
This won’t work for everyone, of course. Full newsletters provide a breadth and depth of information that short-form communications can’t match. There are a number of cases where it could work well, though:- Send a photo of a daily or weekly special item.
- Send a quick hint or tip with your logo.
- Send a picture of a calendar as a registration reminder for an event.
- Send a picture of a coupon.
In Summary
Short-form, postcard-style communications can take advantage of the strengths of mobile devices in the same way that full newsletters take advantage of the strengths of computers. The Postcard app prototype provided a great way to explore this idea in more depth. What do you think? Is it appropriate to alter the communications strategy for different platforms? Would you find utility in an app like this, or is it oversimplified? Leave a comment and let us know what you think.
The opinions expressed here represent those of the author and not those of Constant Contact, Inc. Read Blog Terms
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Rachel | 7:02 PM February 19, 2010
I think this is a really cool idea! It would be awesome if you could send the postcard to contacts in your phone as well as the contacts in your account. I don’t know how or if that would work, but overall I think this is a really good step in the direction that most people these days are going, which is mobile.
QuintalDesigns | 4:44 PM March 1, 2010
Really great idea, I hope to see it so I can choose some basic options, like a border or background color.
Jim Garretson | 4:48 PM March 1, 2010
Hi Ryan, The idea was to pre-generate a lot of the colors and such to integrate well with the templates from the get-go - but I understand that customization is going to be important as well!
hejingjoy | 1:43 AM July 4, 2011
Don’t envelope can be directly to post contains information card; A with adhesive stamps card must be in on one side, have a kind of decoration (like a picture of this kind of card;) Has the government printing stamps mark or official reply fee paid mark card is to use the postcard this social public widely used and accepted way of communications for the carrier, to display image of enterprise, ideas, brand, and product and so on, is a new type of advertising media.
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