Sincerely’s New “Thoughtfulness Engine” Will Help You Remember Birthdays & Special Occasions, Won’t Spam You With Alerts

Sincerely, the mobile gifting startup behind postcard and greeting card apps, as well as newer arrival Sesame for themed gift sets, is on a mission to make the world more thoughtful. To date, it has accomplished that by making gifting easier and quicker through its suite of iPhone and Android applications, and today it’s taking the next logical step with the debut of the Sincerely “Thoughtfulness Engine.”

Simply put, it’s a tool that will help users remember to send cards or gifts to friends and family before it’s too late. Unlike the dozens of “birthday reminder” applications on the market (including Facebook and Google+ themselves, let’s be honest), Sincerely doesn’t just spam you with alerts about every single birthday. Though also based on your Facebook connections, Sincerely instead takes a deeper look into both its own data as well as Facebook’s to determine who it is you really care about.

Explains Sincerely CEO Matt Brezina, around two-thirds of the company’s users are already connected to Facebook. “But we thought it would be pretty annoying if you got push notifications for every one of your friends’ birthdays,” he says. “We only send you push notifications for, generally, the 30 to 40 people we determine are most likely to be your closest friends.”

BirthdayActionScreenTo make that determination, Sincerely looks at those you’ve sent a card and gift to via its apps in the past, those who have tagged you in photos on Facebook, as well as those you’ve given a special designation to on Facebook (e.g. “engaged to,” or listed as a “close friend,” perhaps).

In addition to the birthday alerts, you’ll also be reminded about major holidays involving gifting like Valentine’s Day, or Mother or Father’s Day, for instance. The notifications are sent out once, a week in advance of the event, and you’ll also receive an email reminder.

All these events and the upcoming birthdays are available in a special section of the mobile app, which can also serve as a to-do list for those you need to buy for or remember. Even if you don’t need to send a card or present, buttons in this list let you quickly text, email or call your friend, or write on their Facebook wall. After taking an action, you can then mark it as complete to better keep track.

This to-do list for gifting is now rolling out across all of Sincerely’s mobile applications, debuting first in the iOS versions of Sesame and Ink, then arriving in the iOS version of Postagram in a couple of weeks, and finally hitting Android later on.

Thoughtfulness Email ExampleThough best known for its older postcard-sending mobile app Postagram, Sincerely has been moving towards building a more integrated network of services by making the features it introduces work seamlessly across all its applications – like its Sincerely Address Book does, for example.

The company is now adding a million unique mailing addresses per quarter, with more than 5.5 million added to date. That’s not users, however, but recipients. Brezina says there are now more than 2.6 million regular Sincerely members, and that number is growing at about half a million per quarter. Ink is now the fastest-growing application, while Sesame is set to soon expand beyond just Sincerely-branded products to include those from other companies, like wine or flowers.

Sincerely’s apps are available for download here.