Dennis Kelly: Digitizing direct mail with Postalytics

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Dennis Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Postalytics, a fast-growing software company that automates direct mail marketing, measures the results from direct mailing activity and connects such campaigns to CRM and marketing automation systems to accelerate the way online marketing connects with offline marketing. 

With expertise building VC-backed businesses and self-financed businesses, Dennis is a 6 times entrepreneur with the companies he built. He exited 4 of these businesses to larger corporations.

Postalytics has grown fast with no VC investment and today is scaling in the US and Canada with an aspiration to come to Europe.

During the podcast, the pair cover 1) Dennis’ lessons on building VC-backed and self-financed businesses, 2) what PLG (Product-led growth) means, 3) why every business needs to learn a little bit about PLG and 4) Postalytics’ proposition and roadmap to success.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• I grew up on a farm where my family and I worked very hard and were entrepreneurial in trying to make extra money. I’d reach out to neighbors and people in the community to offer my services and help them with whatever they needed doing. Some of those lessons apply today, such as... not being afraid to knock on someone's door, telling them what you're doing and how you can help them. 
• Postalytics is a direct mail automation software tool designed to solve three big problems with the direct mail marketing workflow. This legacy marketing channel has been around for many years and is still very useful and successful, but it hasn't had much technology applied. We've taken some of the best practices from digital marketing and combined them into a software tool that enables marketers to deploy direct mail campaigns in minutes rather than weeks rapidly.
• We connect direct mail – a physical channel where a printed piece of paper is sent through the postal service – to the marketing tech stack (CRM, CDP), which drives and accumulates knowledge of what happens in a direct mail marketing campaign through Postalytics. Similar to how all digital marketing channels are driven from central locations.
• We've created a method of assigning a unique QR code to each recipient of a piece of mail. The opportunity is to use that physical piece of paper that offers you something while holding it and drive them to your website through the QR code – which everybody is comfortable with now.

BEST MOMENTS

‘Each time you participate in the design and launch of a startup, there's always tremendous learnings you can take away from that experience.’
‘One of the challenges with any offline marketing channel is measuring what is successful and who is/isn't responding. We've created some proprietary methods of measuring both the delivery of the mail and who’s responding and where they are going on your website.’
‘It's impossible for the QR codes to be manipulated by a third party because each one is unique and fully encrypted.’
‘The cost of creating a highly scalable, high-performance platform in the cloud has plummeted. You can do so without spending a huge amount of money. Our business model allows us to capture customers without a tremendous capital outlay. We didn't need to raise much money to get this business off the ground. Once the business got going, it became self-sustaining.’

ABOUT THE GUEST

Denis Kelly is CEO of Postalytics, a fast-growing software company that automates direct mail marketing, measures the results, and connects it to CRM/Marketing Automation. 

Postalytics evolved out of Boingnet, a software tool used by direct mail service providers and agencies to provide landing pages and email campaigns that complement personalized direct mail.

I was co-owner of Wireless City - a chain of 37 Verizon Wireless stores based in Florida, Massachusetts, and Georgia. The company was acquired by Go Wireless in October 2011. Before Wireless City, I was CEO at Adesso Systems, an enterprise mobility software company. Previously, I was CEO and Co-Founder of Adjoin Solutions, Inc., an early Web Services Management market leader. Adjoin was acquired by Computer Associates in July 2003. Before founding Adjoin, I was VP of Web Services at Palm (PALM), leading the Palm.net wireless business, the MyPalm web and mobile portals, and other Palm web properties. Previously, I was COO & Co-Founder of AnyDay.com (sold to Palm), headed sales for Achieve Healthcare, the largest provider of enterprise software and services to the post-acute healthcare industry. And COO at Genesis Business Systems (sold to Achieve). Dennis holds a BA in economics from Colgate University.

I build companies, typically having something to do with technology. My role typically spans product development, sales, marketing, finance, and HR. I started life as a sales guy, spent time building products, and running data centers, have been CEO of venture-backed startups, and have built self-financed businesses.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennisjohnkelly/  

ABOUT POSTALYTICS

With automated direct mail marketing, marketers use Postalytics to stand out from their competitors. Drive new leads and sales with personalized direct mail that complements email and digital marketing. Deep integration with HubSpot, Salesforce, and other CRM/Marketing Automation tools enables direct mail to look, act and feel like a digital marketing channel that happens to produce trackable postcards and letters.

Website - https://www.postalytics.com/ 

ABOUT THE HOST

There are over 140,000 FinTech ventures out there, including FinTechs, InsurTechs, HealthTechs, and WealthTechs. And the number keeps on changing every month. One statistic remains the same: 25% of these ventures have received investment and support from the financing world. 75% of these businesses still seek financing support from institutional and corporate investors alongside value-creating commercial collaboration opportunities with Global Fortune 500. 

Through this podcast series, I would like to demystify the world of corporate venturing, including how corporations collaborate with growth ventures, how venture capitalists and corporate venture capitalists make investment and collaboration choices in ventures and give tech founders and entrepreneurs, the strategies, tactics, tools, and techniques to build, grow and scale their business by understanding how those with financing power think. So, listen in, share and comment as you see fit.

Twitter: SabineVdL

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Website: www.sabinevdl.com