Direct & Digital Media Activation

Canada Post Carrier Walk Export

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Carrier Walks, Letter Carrier Walks, Letter Carrier Routes or LCWs represent the postal codes walked by a Canada Post letter carrier. They are the smallest unit of geography used for the delivery of unaddressed admail or flyers.  Carrier Walk information is updated monthly and is essential for marketers to understand the concentration of their target audience within the Carrier Walk coverage. 

Unaddressed mailing campaigns are typically done to send promotions or raise awareness of a store opening or promotion. With intelligentVIEW, you can optimize the Carrier Walks you select based on where the intelligentSEGMENTS of people you want to target live.

Through our relationship with the Canada Post Smart Mail Program, intelligentVIEW quickly and easily provides Canada-wide letter carrier walks from the Carrier Walks Module and from your profile report. IMPORTANT: If you want to export a Carrier Walk file you must select the Carrier Walk module when running a profile report. If you decide after that you want a file from a report you have already run, rerun the report and add the Carrier Walk module.

  • In your report you will see Carrier Walk in the left hand report menu navigation. Click this.
  • You will be brought to the intelligentSEGMENTS selection tool. From here you can select the specific segments that you want to target.
    • intelligentSEGMENTs are grouped by their letter for ease of use. You can also select individual intelligentSEGMENTS.
      • The percentage values represent the portion of your target file that falls into that segment.
  • Output from the Carrier Walk feature based on the chosen benchmark selected when you ran your report.
    • For example, if segment N2 shows 5.3 percent of your customer file and your benchmark is Montreal CMA, you will be ranking Montreal CMA carrier walks by the number of households they have falling into segment N2.

  • Select the Segment(s) you want to target and click Submit.
  • Select which version of the Canada Post Letter Carrier Walk data you want to choose.
  • The data is updated monthly and usually contains the current version and the latest available version from Canada Post, typically published a month in advance. This helps plan direct mail campaigns ahead of time as per the most up-to-date available Carrier Routes.
  • A list of postal walks that match your segment selection for the selected version of the data will be displayed.

The ranked Carrier Walk file for the selected segments is then generated which displays carrier walks in descending order of Target Penetration.

  • You have the option of choosing to target Houses, Apartments or Farms in any combination which regenerates the list based on the selection made.
  • The system also allows you to precisely narrow down the number of Target points of call for your campaign
  • And finally, you can also input the cost per unit of a mail so that you can accurately estimate your budget.

For example, now that you’ve identified your highest performing segments in CMA Montreal, but you only have a budget of CAD 20,000 for your campaign. Your total cost per unit is $0.20, you can input the cost per unit and select the number of points of call. Assuming that you only want to target Houses and apartments, your selection would look like the following:

  • To get a copy of the output for your letter shop after the filters have been applied, click the Download EST button.
    • The EST file format is Neighbourhood Mail Type 1.
    • Your carrier walk file in EST format will automatically be saved to your browser’s default downloads folder as a .txt file. Send this file to your lettershop.
    • A list of all previously generated Carrier Walks generated by your organization can also be found and accessed by navigating to “Carrier Walk Files” under “Activate Audiences” in the intelligentVIEW Side Navigation screen.

Once you open a carrier walk from the list, it re-generates the carrier walk from the latest available versions of the Carrier Walk file from Canada Post.

So, once you’ve identified your best-performing segments, you can just re-run the latest carrier walk from here every month and re-input your filter parameters of Target points of call and budget.