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Venture Capital News: Postal.io Scoops Up $9M

2020-05-05
SAN LUIS OBISPO, CA, Postal.io, a leading sales and marketing engagement platform has closed a $9 million Series A funding round.
The round was led by Mayfield, the venture capital firm with a 50-year history of people-first investing. Postal helps scale direct mail workflows for sales and marketing, empowering companies to cut through online marketing clutter while improving offline conversion rates with automated direct mail, corporate gifting and charitable giving. In today's era of coronavirus-driven, around-the-clock remote work, creating authentic human connections has become more important than ever, and Postal helps B2B companies find a way to "press palms" with customers in the absence of traditional physical sales calls, meetings and events.

Postal.io was founded by serial entrepreneurs Erik Kostelnik and Jed Danner to bring the efficiency of online marketing to offline engagement. Postal enables companies to manage real-world, hands-off prospect and customer touches in the form of cards and letters, as well as tailored premiums and customer gifts - in the same way they currently manage digital marketing assets and programs. Marketing techniques that were once considered "old school" are now "new again," as savvy B2B marketers leverage Postal to manage and measure offline campaigns for maximum return.

Given that most people are working from home 24/7, the need for solutions like Postal is particularly urgent, because email marketing shows a continued diminishing rate of return. According to industry experts, post-pandemic email marketing volume is up, while response rates remain at near or all-time lows. The current market environment underscores and truly sets the stage for technologies like Postal, which enables marketers to deliver personalized customer and prospect touches at scale. From campaign creation to delivery, Postal drives conversions by leveraging machine learning, customizable workflows and human-like personalization, which lead to experiences and relationships at scale.

"What Marketo, Eloqua and HubSpot did for digital marketing automation, Postal is doing for offline marketing automation, particularly in an era when person-to-person connections have become increasingly difficult, yet remain very important," said Kostelnik, also CEO of Postal.io. "Our platform is designed to create authentic, tactile offline customer connections that help brands drive profitable customer relationships, even in turbulent times. We partnered with Mayfield for their people-first approach and experience in helping build SaaS companies from inception to industry leaders. They also deeply understand customer facing applications, given their successful investments such as Marketo, Outreach, ServiceMax and others."

Proceeds from this Series A investment will be used to grow the Postal team in San Luis Obispo and to scale revenue operations. "For us at Mayfield, it always starts with the founders, their values and vision and desire and potential to build a great Company," said Rajeev Batra, Mayfield Partner and Postal.io board member. "We met Erik and Jed over five years ago when they were working on their first startup together, TextRecruit, which connected job seekers with employers. It was a lesson in enabling personalized human connections at scale. After TextRecruit's successful acquisition, Erik and Jed wanted to build Postal to enable a similar connection between companies and customers leveraging the offline channel, which has been overlooked as the world moved to digital. They are seamlessly combining the best of both worlds which is a massive opportunity and resonates in this unusual time."

Postal gives its clients the ability to scale offline marketing with the ease and speed of digital, and early-adopter customers are seeing the benefit of merging online and offline communication to increase overall conversion rates.

Unlike antiquated, manual and un-trackable processes for offline direct mail and gifting campaigns, Postal provides its clients with the ability to manage and report on offline campaigns just as effectively as they can with digital marketing programs. "Personal handwritten notes and prospect gifting have always been a key part of our enterprise strategy," said Zero Keyboard CEO Braden Golub. "Now we can finally scale and track these efforts with Postal."

According to Erik Hayden, Founder and Managing Partner of Urban Catalyst, "As the fastest-growing Opportunity Zone Investment Fund in California, we use Postal to customize, personalize and automate all direct mail to our potential investors. We have seen a significant increase in our overall conversion rates as we merge our digital efforts with this new offline platform."

More About the Postal.io Platform

Thanks to the rapid adoption of marketing automation technologies, the era of digital sales and marketing has achieved critical mass. Companies have learned that differentiation is central to capturing attention and staying competitive, which is why Postal aggregates the best of online marketing technologies to offer a scalable, best-in-class integrated solution that supports offline sales and marketing. Postal's platform supports enterprise account-based marketing (ABM) and enables team management, content curation, automation, and reporting for offline marketing programs. It includes granular control of personalization, budgeting and workflow management and also offers a curated vendor marketplace for delivery of products and correspondence at scale. Users can access a full suite of management capabilities directly from Postal, and it integrates with popular CRM, marketing automation and sales tools.

About Postal.io

Postal is a leading sales and marketing engagement platform that empowers companies to improve conversion rates with automated direct mail, corporate gifting and charitable giving. The Postal platform leverages machine learning to enable customers to optimize the creation, delivery, budgeting, and reporting of offline campaigns at scale. Forward-thinking enterprises and small companies alike trust Postal to deliver greater ROI through the automation and integration of offline and online strategies. Postal is a venture-backed, privately held company based in San Luis Obispo, California. To learn more, please visit postal.io.
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