When you’re planning a campaign, how do you make sure that you're reaching the right audience? This question is mission-critical to the success of almost any direct mail initiative. Until recently, however, it’s also been a question that has been challenging to answer without extensive manual effort. That’s why Lob, a platform for programmatic direct mail at scale, has joined forces with TowerData, a data-as-a-service (DaaS) provider that specializes in email intelligence.
"When somebody acquires a customer, they might have some behavioral information, they might know what product they bought, they might know what they looked at online, they might know what store they visited," says Phil Davis, chief business officer at TowerData. “Initially, they might not have a ton of information. What we’re able to do, in real time, is marry data points, like age, gender, location, marital status, presence of children, homeowner status, and income, so that we can understand and put better context around the behavior.
TowerData operates with a mission to connect identities across channels, online and offline. The company specializes in building comprehensive user identities.
"We’ve built a database that centers around an email address," explains Phil Davis, chief business officer at TowerData. “From there, we’re able to help marketers connect across channels and understand more about their users behind that channel.”
Davis elaborates:
"We have about 600 million email addresses tied to postal identities. The database is built on a 15-year-history of data collection. We can help marketers match their email addresses to physical addresses and better understand user behavior across both channels."
TowerData wanted a way to extend the value proposition that it provides for email, to direct mail. With a high proportion of the company’s customer base running personalization campaigns, Davis and his team wanted a more direct way to bridge online and offline targeting.
"The Lob integration gives us a new way to marry data points such as age, gender, location, marital status, presence of children, homeowner status, and income so we can better understand and put context around user behavior," Davis explains.
The Lob + TowerData enables personalization at scale with the following capabilities:
Enhanced segmentation. Segmentation is the first step to successful personalization and targeting, across any marketing channel. But many marketers are sifting through too much information to operationalize their big ideas. Big companies, especially, often need to create up to a hundred segments. Smaller organizations struggle to create just three or four.
"Many marketers find that personalization is an incredibly ambitious and overwhelming task in front of them," says Davis. “But you can’t get there overnight. Lob + TowerData allows for segmentation based on a variety of data sources for more effective targeting.”
Cross-channel optimizations. Because of its segmentation capabilities, the TowerData + Lob integration allows marketers to consolidate messaging across acquisition and retention channels. Marketers can string together a series of offers and build up their drip campaigns in a way that brings together multiple channels such as social, email, and direct mail.
"With the Lob + TowerData integration, companies can time their postcards more effectively," explains Davis. “Envision following up on an email with an awesome offer.”
Comprehensive customer pictures. Because the accuracy of a dataset can be so easily compromised, TowerData collaborates with a number of third-party data providers ranging from credit card companies to complementary DaaS vendors to create comprehensive customer profiles. As a result, TowerData consolidates this information into a streamlined, ready-to-use list.
Address lookups based on email. TowerData can match records based on an email address. If a marketer collects email addresses at a conference, for instance, she can use the Lob + TowerData integration to follow-up with a physical postcard.
"Were bringing the capabilities of email to an offline environment," says Davis.
Don’t hesitate to reach out to the Lob or TowerData team if you have any questions.
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