Venture Capital News: Postie Completes $3.5M Seed Round
2018-07-05
LOS ANGELES, CA, Postie, a direct mail platform, has raised $3.5 million in seed funding.
Postie, the only tech and data platform that makes direct mail behave like the best digital acquisition channels, today officially announced its launch in the U.S. market. Postie helps digital marketers apply machine learning and quant marketing to the biggest traditional offline channel - direct mail - making it truly a performance channel, from testing and optimization to audience modeling and attribution. The platform, now available to all marketers, is the only solution on the market to provide prospecting and automated CRM together in one place. Campaigns can easily be deployed and managed in-house within minutes and mailed as quickly as the following day. The company, which is already operating profitably, has received $3.5M in seed funding led by Bonfire Ventures and Crosscut Ventures.
Postie's customers have experienced a new acquisition and retention channel as easy to manage and as effective at driving performance as social. Postie's clients range from direct-to-consumer brands, ecommerce, financial services, insurance and consumer service providers, who have seen CVR %, ROAS and CPA results as strong as the best performing social campaigns.
Marketers spent $46 billion on direct mail and response rates to all direct mail ads and coupons are up 60 percent from a decade ago, according to the DMA. With trust at an all time low, consumers are gravitating toward tangible brands as it's harder to trust something you can't see and touch - and direct mail is helping drive this narrative. In fact, Postie data shows that the highest converting age group for direct mail is millennials in the 20-30 year age range.
"Postie continues to create a resurgence in direct mail by helping advertisers overcome the many issues facing digital ad marketing and the over-reliance on limited platforms. Until now, the vast majority of a brand's media spend has been allocated to digital, and we've cracked the code on what marketers can do to apply these same principles to direct mail," said Dave Fink, CEO and co-founder of Postie. "A highly targeted physical piece of mail, especially in today's ephemeral world, elicits an emotional response that goes above and beyond what is possible online. It's now possible to open up a whole new scalable media channel by leveraging the same data driven insights and quantitative approach as digital."
Postie's platform includes key features that enable marketers to succeed in:
Prospecting -- Postie's data management platform (DMP) gives marketers direct access to the demographic, interest and behavioral data across more than 320 million people. Postie uses a full stack machine learning engine to create deep look-alike models and custom audiences to help brands achieve quantitative marketing objectives.
Retargeting -- Postie bridges the gap between anonymous site visitors and detailed portrait of who each visitor is and why they're on the brand's site. Postie's real-time decision engine allows marketers to deploy direct mail trigger campaigns to high converting segments and get the most efficiency from prospects.
Retention -- Postie integrates with virtually all CRMs, websites, and mobile applications, giving marketers to power to gain deep insights into customers and leads. The platform allows marketers to easily segment their CRM, personalize messaging, and optimize campaigns. In addition, its marketing automation tools make it easy to target based on attributes, look-alike models and even online behavioral events. Marketers can create real-time trigger campaigns or dedicated time-specific deployments. Campaigns can be set up in minutes and mail out the next day.
Reengagement -- Postie gives marketers the ability to automate win-back campaigns to recapture lost revenue. The trigger platform uses a rules-based algorithm to deploy the right mail creative, to the right customers at the most optimal time.
"I started working with Postie when I was CMO of Dollar Shave Club and was impressed with how easily their technology enabled my team to manage direct mail as quantitatively as social and search," said Adam Weber, CMO of Everything But the House. "We were able to A/B test creative, audiences, and create look-alikes, and see attribution in real time. Now at Everything But The House (EBTH), we're challenged with reaching very specific audiences, and Postie allows us to reach these prospects. Their combination of data science, automation, and performance expertise enables the same level of sophistication in reaching consumers in the mailbox as there is in reaching them in the newsfeeds."
Founders Fink and Jonathan Neddenriep, Postie's CTO, have deep backgrounds in digital media and building direct-to-consumer campaigns for brands focused on quant marketing. They offer a unique strength to leverage the direct mail channel to help companies acquire and engage customers and grow rapidly. Their background in particular set the foundation for Postie to understand the quant marketer's mindset, build martech and automation on top of media platforms, and repackage and reinvigorate what can be considered an antiquated channel. Both founders are previously from the incubator, Science, which launched direct-to-consumer brands like Dollar Shave Club, DogVacay and MeUndies and Martech platforms like Famebit and Hello Society.
To learn more about Postie go to https://postie.com/.
About Postie
Postie is the only tech and data platform making direct mail behave like a digital channel. Postie offers prospecting, retargeting, and CRM tools together in one centralized platform, so that direct mail campaigns can be deployed, managed, and measured in real-time, in minutes. Postie helps digital marketers and advertisers apply machine learning and quant marketing to the biggest traditional offline channel, in a familiar and easy-to-use platform, making direct mail truly controlled from inception to attribution for the first time ever. Learn more at https://postie.com/.
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