What to Do With a Referral: Getting It Mailed
To get a referral mailed, upload a postcard or letter design to your Mail tab once, and every matching referral is printed and mailed automatically. Once a referral lands in your dashboard, getting it into someone's mailbox shouldn't be a project. Here's the whole loop, start to finish.
Before any of this: confirm your mailing meets Utah's current Rules of Professional Conduct on advertising and solicitation (see what governs direct mail to defendants now that Rule 7.3 is repealed) and any current Utah State Bar guidance — see the compliance note in our direct-mail cost/timing breakdown for what to check. That's a legal question for you or your own counsel to answer, not something this post covers.
1. How do you upload a design in your Mail tab?
Head to your Mail tab and upload a letter (PDF) or postcard (image) design. You can set one default design that covers any referral, or upload a different one per category — a DUI letter, a traffic postcard, an assault letter, whatever fits how you want to approach each type of case. See one letter doesn't fit every charge for why that matters.
When you upload, you'll choose whether to personalize the piece with mail merge (the recipient's name and your own business details printed in blank spots you place) or to send it exactly as uploaded, so a letter never goes out with blanks by accident. Postcards are a landscape image of 6.25 × 4.25 in (at least 1875 × 1275 px and no larger than 2400 × 1632 px), under 5 MB, with text kept at least 1/4 in from every edge because the outer edge is trimmed. Letters are a PDF on US Letter size with the top of page one left clear for the address. Letters always print in black and white, and postcards always print in color at the standard 4 × 6 in size.
2. What happens after the design is on file?
We print and mail it — automatically, from there. That's genuinely it. Once a design is on file for a category, every new referral in that category gets printed and mailed on your behalf as it's delivered — no ordering, no addressing, no trip to the post office. Your Mail tab shows exactly where each day's batch stands: queued, printing, mailed, or delivered.
Want to see exactly what a lead will receive before it goes to anyone real? Use the "Send test copy" option on any template to have that exact design mailed to an address you choose — yourself, your office, wherever — at the same rate a real referral costs to mail.
3. Don't have a design yet?
Two options:
- Design it yourself, free. Canva's postcard tool is free to use. Set the size to 6.25 × 4.25 in (1875 × 1275 px) so it fits, then export it and upload the file straight to your Mail tab.
- Have us design it for you. Email us and we'll pair you with a designer. Typical cost is $100/hour, about 3 hours on average — a half-hour call to understand what you want, the design work itself, and two rounds of edits.
Whichever route you take, speed matters a great deal alongside the design itself — see the worked example of direct-mail response and close rates for why closing the gap between "referral arrives" and "mail goes out" is one of the most important things here. Uploading a design once and letting it run automatically is what actually closes that gap, rather than a good design that goes out days late. For the full playbook, see how criminal defense attorneys use direct mail to generate new cases.
For the design and attention research behind this, see how to make an effective postcard for your law firm.
Want to see exactly what lands in your inbox? Download a sample spreadsheet — same format you'd actually receive, 250 fictional records so nothing here is a real defendant.