Today’s digital marketers are used to a seamless experience. Digital platforms to manage email communications are optimized for speed and instant analysis. By contrast, when a print and mail vendor walks in the door, the typical depth to which they dive into cardstock or glossy finishes creates culture shock for under-30 digital natives. Their bosses start saying no when clear analytics and ROI can’t be easily dropped into a report. There is an answer, though: Postalytics, built (in part) with Lob.
Lob’s print and mail API make mail intelligent by removing the difficulties inherent in traditional print and mail. Lob make the conception-to-mailstream process painless and easily incorporated into any solution with a wide array of wrappers. Lob is designed to be the engine helping companies deploy direct mail with ease and precision previously reserved for digital-only communications.
The team behind Postalytics, with years of building multi-channel marketing components for direct mail campaigns, saw and seized this market opportunity. Postalytics combines patent-pending pURL technology with deep insights into direct mail response metrics. Leveraging Lob’s well documented and performant APIs, Postalytics has built a clean, intuitive, marketer-friendly platform.
There are two key challenges to executing direct mail that Lob and Postalytics solve together. First is the tedious process of checking a template for compliance with a given printer’s specifications, which has historically been done over repeated phone calls but has been streamlined and simplified with Lob’s rendering engine. Second is the design process, which uses Postalytics’ new web based direct mail editor that hands off to Lob’s print and mail APIs to abstract away all but the most necessary details. This seamless combination of tools empowers marketers to create personalized, trackable postcards and letters, without needing to use offline editors or specialized pURL landing page tools.
Marketers don’t want to use assets for a one time email blast or a one time postcard. Once you’ve put in the effort for designing, personalization, and proofing templates, you should be able to mix and match these assets for campaigns as much as you like. The Postalytics approach to mail templates reflects this.
Template setup offers self-filtering images, based on form factor, through an integration with Unsplash. Variable logic allows marketers to set up different templates and messaging based on a logic statement around one or more variables. For instance, a marketer targeting football fans can set the variable logic to show addresses in Massachusetts an invitation to New England Patriots game, while fans elsewhere in the country might be shown Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott and an invitation to a Cowboys game.
Once a template is customized, it needs to be proofed. Here, Postalytics smoothly hands off to Lob to streamline the process. Rather than play phone tag with account managers at direct mail vendors, marketers can automatically preview templates through Postalytics.
Templates are automatically checked for compliance with regard to size, bleed, and other specifications. They’re also checked with the largest possible variables based on list data. Postalytics offers fixed length or variable length pURLs, such as friendly URLs (firstlast.domain) where the recipient’s first and last names quite long. Once Postalytics users proof templates with Lob’s rendering engine, they can be saved and re-used endlessly.
Lob’s print and mail API allows customers to quickly choose and customize a variety of different form factors. Rather than lock customers into one specific form factor, Postalytics leverages multiple Lob endpoints to offer customers a choice of 4x6 postcards, 6x9 postcards, 6x11 postcards, or full-sized letters.
The direct mail editor, proprietary to Postalytics, reflects this solution’s philosophy of giving users everything they need and nothing they don’t. The editor is designed for email-savvy professionals to easily crank out direct mail templates, and abstracts away the complex process of verifying minute details by calling Lob’s APIs.
Because we rely on modern RESTful APIs rather than outdated protocols like FTP, automated triggers can be set and incorporated into larger workflows. No batching required--Lob’s industry-leading SLA ensures the customer hits each touchpoint in a workflow exactly when you want them to.
With greater bidirectional communications comes more accurate tracking. Using Lob’s Intelligent Mail Tracking tracking, Postalytics passes direct mail tracking to digital marketers. By capturing the movements of a piece of mail as it moves through the mailstreamit, Postalytics can aggregate data and help marketers can work backwards to schedule each mail drop. Ultimately, the delivery status of every piece of mail, along with every web page visited in response to a mailpiece, is aggregated into user friendly dashboards that give marketers instant visibility into direct mail campaign ROI.
And remember: it’s all automated, and all effortless. Postalytics looks and feels like a digital platform because it is a digital platform; just one that prints and mails collateral. With Lob’s direct mail APIs powering Postalytics’ mail editor, marketers raised on digital don’t ever need to leave their wheelhouse.
Lob is driven by a vision to be the infrastructure provider of the API future. We want our partners to offer customers simplified, cleaned up approaches to constructing and executing outreach. Postalytics makes direct mail campaigns as easy as choosing a template (object), pairing it with an address file (list), and clicking ‘send’.
The biggest reason we were excited to work with the Postalytics team is the philosophical alignment between Postalytics and Lob. Both are tools built to help modernize processes that have lagged behind both customer and end user expectations: Lob addresses direct mail at scale, where Postalytics brings an entirely new take to marketing campaign execution and analytics.
Postalytics, in particular, has used Lob’s APIs (along with their own proprietary tooling) to build an easy, fast environment to help digital marketers create integrated experiences across all channels and measure those experiences like digital channels. If you’re looking for a tool to execute omnichannel strategies just like you’re used to sending email blasts, and also looking for a tight Hubspot integration, Postalytics is the tool you need.
If you’re looking to join the movement and use Lob’s APIs to offer seamless direct mail to your customers, we’d love to hear from you!
