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Welcome to Lob! 👋

Lob's mission is to help the world send intelligent mail, one mail piece at a time. By making direct mail sends as easy as email through the use of modern APIs, Lob strives to modernize this often overlooked channel of direct communication.

Lob is a great fit for all users of direct mail from all walks of life:

• Are you brand new to direct mail as a channel, and looking for ideas and best practices on getting started?

• Are you looking to infuse direct mail automation into your existing business workflows and seeking for ways to modernize your enterprise solutions and tools?

• Or are you building a highly sophisticated experimentation program using this rapidly iterative and performative channel?

Start at a pace you're most comfortable with, and Lob can help meet your direct mail needs, one step at a time.

Getting started with Lob

Sending mail in an accurate, reliable, and programmatic way involves the following four steps:

Audience targeting

The first step to any successful direct mail program is to put together an audience list for effective targeting.

Whether you are using your own customer data or augmenting with third-party lists, make sure that you create targeted mailing lists with select attributes to maximize your responses and channel ROI.

Easily upload your campaign audience list in Lob Campaigns, or send a recipient address per mail piece in your API calls.

You can also improve the deliverability of your mail pieces by passing your addresses through Lob's National Change of Address functionality to reduce bad addresses, or incorporate Lob's Address Verification product to fully ensure your mail data is as accurate as possible to maximize your intended reach.

Mail creation

Next, our API-first solution provides incredible flexibility in determining how you want to send your mail: send high-volume campaigns quickly and at scale, or build automated mail sends triggered through omnichannel business workflows.

In order to use direct mail with Lob, there are three components that must be thought through to send mail via our platform:

• Design: generate clear and concise instructions around what you're sending, including creative artwork and copy. Learn about designing creatives in Lob.

• Data in: pass data that determines how you want to send mail and get it delivered, including address data, merge variables for personalization, postage and delivery strategy. Learn about building your mail strategy in Lob.

• Data out: pass data that exports mail tracking information to enable downstream workflows or measure attribution for better performance. Learn more about how to calibrate your mail data in Lob.

Mail production

Based on your API call submission and send settings, a printer from a strategically distributed network of printers managed by Lob will fulfill your orders. Once printed, your mail orders will be handed off to USPS for delivery.

Track your mail order at each stage of production (and delivery) by utilizing our mail tracking, and get near real-time updates via our webhooks.

Mail delivery

Once production is fulfilled by our printers, your mail will be on its merry way to be delivered to its final destination! Lob uses USPS for delivery in the US; as such, Lob does not have physical control over your mail once USPS has taken possession.

However, working hand-in-hand with USPS as our partner, Lob is able to provide granular digital tracking details of each individual mail piece as it moves towards its destination. As the mail makes its way through every distribution or sorting facility, or arrives at the area post office, USPS will send mail tracking details to Lob. Lob will then surface this information in near real-time, ensuring your mail pieces were delivered in a timely manner and received by the intended recipient.

Craft the best path forward

Depending on where you are in your quest for intelligent mail, or given your available budget or resources, there are multiple ways to leverage Lob's platform and accelerate your growth. Read on!

Learn about our platform

We're not your average direct mail experience. Explore Lob and see how we can meet your immediate needs for direct mail automation.

• Dive right in: Send your first campaign via our easy-to-follow dashboard UI to get a feel for intelligent direct mail.

• Explore our APIs! Check out our API quickstart quide to explore our APIs in your preferred programming language, explore our our Postman collection, and go to GitHub to access our supported SDK libraries.

Experiment with your inputs and outputs

Understand other ways in which you can up-level your direct mail program.

• Explore how to operationalize dynamic personalizations to create mail pieces that can truly resonate with your audience

• Experiment with different methods of mail sends and mail delivery strategy to see how to best increase relevance and conversion

• Ingest mail tracking data, set up notification alerts via webhooks, or add QR codes to improve attribution and reporting

• Access advanced features and more mail formats to improve audience responses as needed

• Generate a campaign hypothesis, and build split-test or multivariate test cohorts to see which creative or campaign resonates with your segment

Enrich your data, connections, and processes

Explore our integrations so you can learn how to tap into your existing tech stacks and augment your datasets to expand the possibilities of creating seamless and timely omnichannel experiences with a touch of direct mail.

If you are a world-class technology company interested in partnering with us, learn more here.