Print & Delivery Timeline
From campaign trigger to letterbox. Understand how your postcards are processed, printed, and delivered via Australia Post.
Postcard Status Lifecycle
Every postcard progresses through a series of statuses on its way to the recipient’s letterbox: Pending → Queued → Sent to Printer → Printing → Shipped → Delivered. A postcard can also be marked as Holdout (excluded for testing) or Failed (could not be processed).
Pending
Your postcard has been created and is waiting to be checked against suppression rules before going to print.
Queued
Your postcard has passed all checks and is ready to be printed in the next print run.
Sent to Printer
The postcard has been sent to our printing partner and is waiting to be printed.
Printing
Your postcard is currently being printed by our printing partner.
Shipped
The printed postcard has been handed off to Australia Post for delivery.
Delivered
The postcard has been marked as delivered based on the estimated transit time (default 5 business days from shipping).
Holdout
This recipient was randomly assigned to the holdout group for A/B testing. No postcard is printed or sent, but the recipient is tracked for comparison.
Failed
Something went wrong with this postcard. Common reasons include an invalid address or the recipient being excluded by suppression rules.
Processing Schedule
Automated campaigns are processed on a daily schedule.
Campaign Processing
Daily at 2:00 AM AEST. TouchDrop checks active automated campaigns, identifies new recipients, and creates postcards.
Redemption Tracking
Daily at 6:00 AM AEST. A second daily job checks for discount code redemptions and attributes conversions back to campaigns.
Manual triggers
One-time campaigns and manual triggers can be run at any time from the campaign detail page. They don’t wait for the daily schedule.
How Printing Works
Once your postcards are ready, TouchDrop handles everything. Postcards are grouped together and sent securely to our professional printing partner.
What happens behind the scenes
- All queued postcards for your campaign are grouped into a print run.
- Each postcard includes the recipient’s address, your artwork, their unique discount code, and QR code.
- The print run is sent securely to our printing partner, who handles professional printing and postage.
- Once printed, your postcards are handed to Australia Post for delivery.
Print quality
All postcards are professionally printed on high-quality card stock. Your artwork is reproduced in full colour on both sides. The printing and postage process is fully managed by TouchDrop — you don’t need to coordinate with the printer directly.
Estimated Delivery
After a postcard is shipped, TouchDrop estimates delivery based on a configurable transit window.
Default transit time
5 business days. Each campaign has a configurable transit time, used to estimate when the postcard will arrive and when the attribution window begins.
Delivery estimation
Once the transit period has elapsed from the ship date, the status is updated to “delivered”. This is an estimate — Australia Post does not provide individual tracking for postcards.
Typical Timeline
Here is a typical timeline from when a campaign runs to when a postcard arrives in the recipient’s letterbox.
Day 0 — Campaign runs at 2 AM AEST. New postcards are created for qualifying recipients and sent to our printer.
Day 1–2 — Postcards are professionally printed and handed to Australia Post for delivery.
Day 6–7 — Postcards arrive in letterboxes (estimated 5 business days transit). The attribution window begins.
Common questions
How long does a postcard take to arrive?
Plan on Australia Post's published Regular letter timeframe of 3-7 business days from lodgement, and note that Australia Post now delivers regular letters every second business day rather than every business day. Add print and lodgement time before that. Mail is not a same-week channel and should not be planned as one.
Can I time a postcard to land on a specific day?
No, and you should be sceptical of anyone who says otherwise. With delivery rounds running every second business day and a multi-day delivery window, the landing date is a range rather than a date. Trigger-based mail works because it fires on the right event, not because it lands on the right morning.
Is direct mail too slow for an abandoned cart?
It is too slow to catch someone mid-checkout, so treat it as a second wave rather than a replacement for the email. It works best on higher-value carts where the margin justifies the postage and where the buying decision was never going to be resolved in an hour anyway.
What happens if a customer has moved?
Some cards will reach a stale address, and that is a real cost of the channel: roughly 12% of Australian households move each year, so a customer file decays whether or not you act on it. Addresses are validated before printing and undeliverable formats are excluded, but validation confirms an address exists, not that your customer still lives there. Mailing recent buyers rather than your whole history is the practical defence.
How do I know the print quality will represent my brand?
Order a proof before you scale. Print quality is a recurring complaint across direct mail vendors generally, and the sensible response is to check the physical article yourself rather than take any vendor's word for it, including ours.
Do I need a designer to produce artwork?
No, templates cover the standard postcard layouts and merge in the per-recipient code and QR automatically. If you have brand artwork you can supply your own. The design work that matters most is the offer and the reason to come back, not the visual polish.
Where are the postcards printed?
Printed in Australia and lodged with Australia Post by a licensed Australian mail house. That is what keeps postage at domestic rates and delivery in days rather than the weeks that printing offshore and shipping in would add.
What happens if a print run fails or a batch is delayed?
Batches carry a status through the campaign timeline, and a batch that cannot be dispatched cleanly is held and flagged rather than being sent twice. The failure mode is a delayed card, not a duplicate mailing.