Postal.io redefines offline B2B marketing

Offline sales and marketing engagement is being redefined by Postal.io, particularly in today’s era of social distancing and remote work brought about by the global coronavirus pandemic. Ushering in a new era of capability and control, Postal’s sales and marketing automation platform enables enterprise B2B companies to effectively manage offline marketing programs – including personalized direct mail, gifts and donations – in the same way that they currently manage digital marketing programs using customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation tools.

Postal’s all-in-one solution fills a critical gap in the martech stack, bringing the efficiency of online marketing to offline engagement. Postal enables companies to manage hands-off prospect and customer touches to achieve genuine connections that drive profitable sales and marketing ROI. Current processes for supervising offline direct mail and gifting are antiquated, manual and un-trackable, and Postal gives B2B companies of any size the ability to create, manage and report on offline programs as effectively as they can manage digital campaigns.

“Digital marketing has hit critical mass, and today’s marketers must find ways to differentiate – which is why offline has become the new online,” said Erik Kostelnik, CEO of Postal.io. “In an increasingly noisy and highly regulated landscape, today’s B2B marketers must merge direct mail with their digital campaigns to drive personalized and authentic customer connections at scale, which is precisely why we designed and built the Postal platform – to help our clients deliver compelling marketing programs that can be managed and measured with ease.”

An Urgent Market Need

The need for customer connections has become increasingly urgent in B2B sales, given the global COVID-19 crisis and the resulting need for people to work from home. According to experts, coronavirus-driven sheltering in place has led to an approximately 50% overall increase in the volume of email-based marketing campaigns, while response rates continue to drop. Prospective buyers are experiencing digital overload, illustrating the need for a different approach that creates lasting connections with customers by merging online and offline techniques to increase conversion rates.

Unlike existing account-based marketing (ABM) solutions, Postal aggregates the best of online marketing technologies to offer a scalable, best-in-class integrated solution. The Postal platform leverages machine learning, customizable workflows and human-like personalization to create positive and memorable customer experiences and enables building relationships at scale, for small businesses and enterprise companies alike.

Postal’s own research shows that direct mail response rates more than double overall prospect conversions when offline marketing is integrated into existing prospecting workflows, including calls, emails, chat, and digital advertising. According to Manny Medina, CEO of Outreach.io, “The integration of online and offline marketing, like Postal has achieved, represents a significant market opportunity because integration of direct mail and gifting with digital engagement represents a well-rounded strategy that can help sales teams drive long-term success.”

From campaign creation to delivery, the Postal platform helps automate and scale customer and prospect communication while driving tracking and reporting information back into marketing systems of record. Postal integrates with all popular CRM and sales/marketing automation platforms, providing granulated control and deep visibility into campaign operations and ROI. Postal’s solution delivers:

• Team Management — capabilities that allow marketing and sales users to manage communications through separate user accounts, while administrators can simultaneously supervise team budgets, as well as design and approve postal direct mail and gifts and save approved messages for teams to use in customer communications. The “Postal Anywhere” Chrome browser extension makes sending direct mail and gifts from the system as easy as sending an email.
• Content Curation – design editor capabilities within Postal enable customers to create their own direct mail designs and personalize text content with AI-powered digital handwriting, as well as to manage deliveries, ensuring that home office deliveries can be completed.
• Automation and Reporting – triggers in Postal drive execution of offline marketing tasks, and all activity in Postal is tracked via existing CRM, sales automation and marketing automation platforms to create data consistency and a comprehensive audit trail.

The Postal platform ultimately transforms offline marketing from “old school” to “new school,” because it enables B2B marketers to manage and measure programs for critical ROI with the ease and speed of digital technology. As part of this transformation, Postal has developed a proprietary metric called “cost per touch,” or CPT, that enables customers to compare the average cost of an offline engagement with other online advertising metrics such as cost per click (CPC) or cost per lead (CPL).

Customers agree that Postal represents a powerful way forward. “Prior to Postal, we utilized email automation, and our sales team sent handwritten notes to clients and prospects,” commented Braden Golub, CEO of Zero Keyboard. “Now, Postal.io has given us a platform which enables us to communicate with clients and prospects in a unique and scalable fashion. Since implementation, we’ve added direct mail automation functionality to our email automation and increased our response rates by 23%, and we’ve saved our sales team many hours each week by automating handwritten communication through the Postal platform.”

Series A Investment

Founded by serial entrepreneurs Erik Kostelnik and Jed Danner, Postal recently closed a $9 million Series A financing round, led by venture capital firm Mayfield. Mayfield’s investment was driven by the successful track record of Postal’s founders and the company’s completeness of vision around filling a crucial gap in the martech stack. The company will use proceeds from the investment to grow the Postal team and scale revenue operations.