Boosted by Fresh Funding, PebblePost Gives Snail Mail a Programmatic Upgrade

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Having raised $25 million in Series C funding just last month, PebblePost is hard at work on building out its presence in the nascent space that is programmatic for snail mail, said Geoff Dodge, the company’s Chief Growth Officer.

PebblePost leverages digital consumer data to connect brands to consumers by serving personalized ads into customer mailboxes. The mailings can offer personalized discounts for consumers to use online, in-store, or over the phone. Mail informed by a person’s online habits can be “very valuable to the consumer,” Dodge said.

Programmatic in the digital world promises marketers the right person and message at the right time and price. “We’re taking that technology, and then applying it not to re-serving digital ads through a DSP, but serving ads into a consumer’s mailbox,” Dodge said.

For example, if a consumer looks at sandals on the Designer Shoe Warehouse website, she could then receive mail that offers her a discount on sandals. In another example, a mailing that advertises celebrity cruises could suggest that the consumer bring the ad to a travel agent. This marketing approach allows consumers “to buy what they want, when they want, and they get a discount,” Dodge said.

Dodge cited the recent fundraising round and contracts signed with multiple hundreds of brands as indicators of the company’s recent success and potential for growth. “We built the business on the backs of small- to mid-size e-commerce companies, but now we’re squarely working with much larger enterprise retails brands,” he said.

“The recent fundraising round will allow PebblePost to maintain our … advantage by building awesome software that continues to help deliver” success, Dodge said. The software technology relies on algorithms to evaluate digital data variables, and “machine learning plays a big role in everything we are doing,” he added.

PebblePost offers marketers the promise of large quantities of data, scale (from the addresses of homes across the country), and a positive consumer experience, similar to the offerings of marketing giants like Facebook and Google, Dodge said. PebblePost’s capabilities “check a lot of interesting boxes, and I think that’s why we will be able to compete,” he added.

Anna Kramer is a staff writer at Street Fight.

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