Mailed Postcards Don't Look Correct
We know how important the appearance of your final messages sends are. If you set up your message and noticed that the final postcards delivered had a printing issue and did not look correct, we need to look into the root cause of what happened.
Yodel aims to make sure all printed postcards look as you would expect them to. The appearance of the final message is a reflection on you, or your sending group, as much as it is a reflection on us. Our goal is to have nice, professional mailings.
Expected & Acceptable Variation
There will always be some natural variation in the printing process and the condition of the postcards upon arrival in the mailbox.
Some color variation should be expected. The colors you see on screen are produced by light in RGB. The colors you see on a postcard are produced by inks in CMYK. There will be some natural color shifts, due to the gamut range within the different color spaces. Most of the time the shift is minor and would be deemed acceptable. Shades of blue can be particularly difficult to color match across print and digital. Printers can even differ from print run to print run. It is an imperfect science.
There may also be minor differences in font display. Again, most of the time this should have little consequence and likely viewed as acceptable. Other times it may make more of a difference.
When the postcards are printed, we include "bleed" where the final postcard is cut down and the ink runs all the way to the edges. To achieve this, it means that up to an eighth of an inch on all sides may be trimmed off full-width images. This can also make lines or shapes that run along the trim edge appear to have different margins at times. These kinds of sizing offsets should be expected.
The mailing process may cause a certain amount of damage to the postcards during transit. This can include bending or tearing of the postcard, scuffed or streaked ink, water/rain damage, or other effects that should be accepted as unavoidable consequences of sending a postcard through the postal service.
Unacceptable Errors
There are certain types of unacceptable issues when your postcards contain errors such as:
Bad colors, such as if the ink colors (CMYK) were not applied properly.
Poor cropping or trimming with chopped off text or images.
Incorrect text or images, where they do not match what you saved and approved.
When there are unacceptable errors on the postcard mailings, please ensure you have retained proof of either actual delivered postcards or photos/scans of the actual cards. The best proof, though not required, would include more than one delivered card documenting that it was a problem on multiple postcards that were delivered.
In these cases, please begin by reaching out to our support team using our online contact form. We review these situations on a case-by-case basis. Our team will communicate with you on finding a resolution which can include a full or partial refund of your payment depending on how severe the issue was and if the desired message was conveyed to your audience or not.