How to stand out from your competitors with direct mail marketing
How is Postalytics helping marketers?
Dennis: Postalytics is a direct mail automation software platform, and we help marketers at small to mid-size businesses send direct mail marketing campaigns through the postal service. In a far more efficient manner, in a way that is synchronized with their CRM and marketing automation tools that they use for their email and their digital marketing campaigns, in a way that can be analyzed with data about the delivery and the response to the direct mail.
The problem Postalytics is solving
Dennis: The biggest problem is that direct mail marketing is stuck in the 1990s from a workflow perspective. The way that direct mail is produced has not changed, has not evolved, and is completely disconnected from the other marketing channels. Postalytics is a cloud-based solution designed to pull direct mail together to work with email and digital marketing campaigns and make it a simple and fast process for marketers instead of very long emails or phone calls. Postalytics makes it integrated, providing analytics about what is used, what is working, and what is not.
Which businesses need direct mail automation?
Dennis: We’re selling primarily to small to mid-size marketing teams in businesses with between 20 and 1000 employees. Most of our customers invested heavily in CRM and marketing automation tools such as Salesforce or HubSpot. They are either doing direct mail today the old-fashioned way, and they want to do it in a more innovative, faster way, or they’re starting to run into a lower response rate in their email marketing, and they want to try to add direct mail to give their overall marketing a new addition.
One of our great case studies is with a company called Zoic, which sells supplies to gyms, workout facilities, and health clubs. They have 30,000 customers across the US, and they use Postalytics primarily to connect with older customers who have stopped opening their email. They’ve set up automated workflows inside of HubSpot to watch if a customer has not purchased from them in six months. If a customer, that same customer has not opened the last three emails that have been sent, that customer gets routed to a multiple-touch direct mail campaign where large oversized postcards are mailed out every three weeks over five weeks. They’ve got a 150% boost in ROI.
Why you need to try direct mail as your new marketing channel
Dennis: By adding this channel to an existing email campaign, you are making the people ignoring your emails come back. Maybe they’re going to spam or unsubscribe to their emails, but they can still receive direct mail. It can be very effective when it’s very thoughtfully used and very targeted. You don’t have to send direct mail to everybody in the world. It costs more per piece, but a physical thing you hold has a much more substantial impact, while you see an email or a digital ad very quickly.
Although it is more expensive, it has more impact, and we’re trying to help marketers be brilliant about how they use direct mail. Direct mail would be better for physical businesses to sell than online ones, right? Any kind of business that already has addresses of customers or prospects makes a lot of sense. E-commerce, retail, real estate, financial services, and healthcare all of these industries have physical addresses of their customers, so they should all be using direct mail, at least as a part of their strategy.
Best Postalytics features
Dennis: We have a cloud-based solution where a marketer can log in, create a campaign within 20 minutes, press send, and do everything for you. Think of it as if you’re sending an email, correct? You fill in your email, decide who you’re going to send it to, press send, and then it gets routed to email servers worldwide. We work the same way. You decide what you want to say and who you will send it. Your press sends, and we route these, mail the mail to printers spread out around the United States or Canada. Then the printing and the mailing happen behind the scenes. You don’t have to worry about it. Our top three features would be that it’s much faster, we have a lot of integrations, and then we provide a dashboard of where your mail is in the delivery process and who’s responded to your mail through some QR codes and URLs that we embed in the mail.
Postalytics pricing plans
Dennis: You can log into Postalytics and create an account for free and use the software for free until you decide to send mail. At that point, there are printing costs and postage costs. We have thousands of users that use the free plan. If you’re going to send more than, say, 1000 pieces of mail in a month, then it makes sense for you to subscribe to one of our plans and so you can sign up for what we call the Marketer plan for $199 /month or the Pro plan for $399 /month. When you sign up for one of those plans, you get significant discounts on the mail cost for you to send mail.
Postalytics great integrations
Dennis: We have many other integrations apart from HubSpot and Salesforce. We have integrations with Pipedrive, Freshsales, Zoho CRM, Klaviyo, and Zapier. We also have a full API integration so you can embed Postalytics in your workflow.
How competitive is the direct mail space?
Dennis: A couple of other companies are working on similar ideas. Everybody’s doing their version, but the vast majority is still performed using email, spreadsheets, and old-fashioned techniques. Four or five companies are similar to us, but I would say 99% of the mail sent is still being done the old-fashioned way. We’re here to disrupt and to make it more efficient.
About the company
Dennis: Postalytics was launched at the end of 2020. I’m the only investor, and we’ve been cash flow positive, and we haven’t needed to go outside for any capital. There are currently 15 of us, and we are adding more positions now.
Advice for bootstrapped SaaS founders
Dennis: I think the most important thing is to build a business model that produces cash. If you do that, you are in control of your destiny. You can sell stock, or you can raise money by selling stock. You can use your cash flow to use debt financing. But if you don’t have cash flow, investors are in, and they will dictate the terms by which you will either receive money or not. From my perspective, the most important thing is to have a strong cash flow in your business. Think about that from the beginning and find a way for it to generate cash, and then you control destiny. Cash flow is king, especially in an economic downturn like we’re experiencing now. Investors are all of a sudden saying they’re not writing checks. If you have cash flow, this doesn’t affect you.
What is your vision with Postalytics?
Dennis: Ultimately, we envision a way to distribute mail around using the internet and printing locally, very close to where the recipients of the correspondence are. Rather than producing it in one place and shipping it worldwide, it’s better to print it nearby and just send it quickly. That is ultimately what we would like to build – a worldwide network that will radically transform the efficiency of how mail gets distributed around the world.
What is your story, Dennis?
Dennis: I began my career working for a very large insurance company, and I was trained in sales, and I enjoyed it and learned a lot. When you’re part of a big company, your efforts are essential, but they’re very small and don’t have a huge impact. And so, I thought I wanted to go into something very small where my efforts would significantly affect me. A friend of mine had started a software company with his brother and needed a salesperson. I was trained in sales, and I quit my job and took a significant pay cut to be the first salesperson at this company. And that’s what got me started in technology and startups.
What’s your favorite software?
Dennis: Aside from Postalytics, my favorite software that I think is tremendous software is Loom. Loom is excellent, and it makes my life easy. It makes the life of our customer service team and customers easy, and it’s just a wonderful application.
