How Local Messages Are Sent
NOTE: Yodel is currently in beta with intentionally limited geographic reach. We'll work to roll out the service to more areas as quickly as we can.
After creating a message, selecting your audience, filtering your recipients, and setting a target date... As the target date approaches, your message will go through Yodel approvals, and then a final price will be sent to you for your acceptance. Your payment confirmation needs to be timely in order to keep your desired target date.
Starting with Postcard Mailings
Yodel's default message send is through postal mail as a postcard. Using publicly available address information supplemented by other data sources, your chosen message audiences are mapped to the geographic address information. Your message will be sent to all known addresses within the locales you've selected including units such as apartments and suites, unless recipients with a Yodel account have provided alternative receiving notification preferences in their account settings.
Digital Delivery Options by Request
If a recipient is matched to your audience list and they have a Yodel account, they can choose different delivery methods for how they wish to receive messages through Yodel. If a user prefers to receive messages via email or SMS text, they can choose not to receive postcards.
Who Yodel Considers as a Recipient
At the base level, Yodel will map a known street address by geo-locating it within a geographic area or specific address that you've selected while creating a message. In this case, the recipient is anonymous and a postal mailing is the default method of sending your message to them.
When a user creates a Yodel account, they can set up additional receiving locations, areas, and routes. When doing so, this broadens the geographic matching for them, based on areas of interest they may have. These additional receiving locations may include their work, school, family members' addresses, routes they take often, or any other area of interest they may have.
One-to-one address matching is simple, but not the only process we use. Area overlap matching is another means of recognizing interested recipients which makes it much more likely to find additional matching recipients.
Some users will want to be notified about messages for addresses that they do not live at. Perhaps they are monitoring news for a family member's house or a vacation house. This means that Yodel may find more than one recipient at the same address, but the mailing address for notification may differ. User's can set an alternate receiving address for this purpose in their account settings. This will force Yodel to find a match on one address, but to send the notification to a different address.
Apartments, Suites, and Unit Numbers
Apartment, suite, room, building, and other units in our data sets increase the number of recipients. As mentioned in our Disclaimers, Yodel cannot guarantee delivery to every single recipient in a selected area — we can only work off the address data we have available. In some cases, this could mean that an apartment complex only receives one postcard without any apartment number attached. Yodel is continually working hard to include full sets of addresses, including apartments, suites, and other sub-units.
Sole Recipients
A registered Yodel user can mark themselves as a sole recipient for a given street address. Doing so will trigger a validation process to prove that they can receive mail at the location.
A validated sole recipient can then control how messages are sent for that location. This means if they change their notification preferences to receive messages only by email, then there will be no postcard sent.
If they are unable to complete the validation steps, then Yodel will still honor that individual's notification preference, but will still send a postcard message also. This ensures that anyone else who can receive mail at that location will still receive the message.
Responses from Recipients
Anyone receiving messages through the Yodel service has the opportunity to respond and react to the messages. If they create a free Yodel account, they can give a simple like or dislike reaction or write a short message to the sender. Both reactions and replies are anonymous unless the user provides personal information in their written reply.
The recipients cannot see the contact information of the sender because the responses are sent through Yodel. However, by sending as a group, the sending group has the option to include some basic marketing contact information including their website address.
Blocked Senders
Recipients can go one step further and block senders that they do not want to receive messages from. To completely stop the message for a given location, they have to prove themselves to be the sole recipient for that street address. If they are not the sole recipient, then a message will still be sent to the physical address as an anonymous recipient, but this known user will not be included in the list of recipients for that address.
Being blocked by a user is not necessarily a bad thing. Blocking is a clear indication that the recipient is not interested in your messages. If you continued to send them messages, they may become irritated. Their block will prevent you from being charged for their address in future message sends, saving you money.