This lesson is short but it's important to get started the right way...

First up, let’s define a ‘Campaign’ in the world of ‘Automated Direct Mail’.

A Campaign used to be when you would decide on the timing and the content and do a massive mailing to thousands of people in one hit. Whilst you can do that easily, the real benefit of ZAP~POST is almost the complete reverse of that:
- Set up a campaign
- Connect your data source
- As your Customers and Contacts meet the rules of the Campaign, a single piece of Direct Mail is triggered and sent to each recipient

The content can change as often as you like. And you can run as many campaigns as you like too, so the content is personalised, and relevant, and the timing is perfect.

So let’s jump into Campaigns:

Create a New Campaign by selecting from one of the sector-specific templates. There are more coming on stream all the time, and we can always set up a Custom template if needed. The templates only refer to data, not the design element.

We’ll select the Lapsed Customer Campaign.

Give it a friendly name and save it. At this point, to see the data, you can download the simple CSV template so you can see the data points that are available. Check the lesson on Data and Data sources in the Academy for more detail on this.

Now you see a list of your current campaigns. Note the table headings here: Name, Type, the date of initial setup, and its current status. Its default status is always ‘Waiting’.  It's waiting on three things:
- Content
- Billing info
- Data

If you have the recipient data ready, populate the template and upload it directly via CSV. Otherwise, select the Edit Design button to jump into the Design portal.

And that's it, this lesson is complete!

Check out the next video tutorial in this series: How to design your Zap.