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What Is Lob?
Lob Direct Mail is the #1 platform for delivering automation, scale, and efficiency for your offline customer communications. Lob takes the traditional, largely manual, process of proofing, printing, and mailing, and turns it into an automated service that integrates with your CRM, marketing automation, and customer database.
With Lob, you can send retention postcards the same way that you use digital tactics. You can trigger direct mail engagements based on customer behavior or milestones.
Who Uses Lob?
Unlimited scalability for Marketing (sending acquisition, retention, or win-back campaigns) and Operational/Transactional (sending statements, refund checks, or policy updates) use cases.
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Reviews of Lob
Trigger-based actions = prospects now get mail within 7 days, not 7 weeks
Comments: Overall, an incredible time-saver. Event-based triggers are an incredible innovation. We look forward to doing more dynamic personalization in the future.
Pros:
The trigger-based actions are a game-changer. Prospects / customers now get direct mail just 7 days after they take an action, like download a pricing sheet. They get direct mail faster, and it reduces my workload by a LOT. I'm no longer pulling lists and scheduling out direct mail to hit 2 months from now. I also like the dynamic personalization, but because the designs have to be in Figma > Lob, I don't use this as much.
Cons:
It's weird that you can't dynamically insert text into the letter format...without a letter being added into a Figma design file? This seems like a basic functionality and I'm perplexed that they don't have it. Also, Customer Service has been up and down. Due to changes in the Lob team, we fell through the cracks and didn't really get onboarded. To be fair, however, we also onboarded ourselves really quickly, so we didn't leave them much time. I've had great meetings with the Lob team where I felt they understood my needs, but there have also been instances where we have to schedule a support meeting several days to a week out...which doesn't help me when something is immediately broken. I think Lob should probably hire a few more Customer Support people so their existing people have more time.
So Simple
Pros:
The API is so simple to work with, it makes developing fun! We use their postcards API to send thank you postcards to first-time customers, and the address verification API to check addresses before shipping orders. The Address Verification has saved us so much time speaking to UPS to update incorrect addresses and lots of customers that are no longer blaming us for wrong address.
Cons:
None. We haven't had any problems with Lob!
Poor Product Quality
Comments: Lob has great developer docs but an extremely lack luster product. Supply chain issues are a huge red flag and we are concerned there are bigger issues at play.
Pros:
Lob has great developer documentation. The developer docs are easy to read.
Cons:
1. Set-up time is extremely intensive. Since lob is an API we needed to hire developers to setup the direct mail functionality. We also had to keep them on staff to maintain it. $$$$ 2. Product skews are extremely limited. Very few options to choose from. 3. Quality was lack luster. We noticed that the same size postcards were being printed in two different states. Each print facility was using different paper weights. Extremely sketchy quality.
Really helpful API
Pros:
A good tool for offline mail automation, simplifies and accelerates this process a lot.
Cons:
I think it should be much cheaper, quite expensive for now.
Clean API but delivery time is slow
Pros:
Really easy to get started sending letters, and HTML template support ensured the letters we sent look great
Cons:
The printing and delivery speed ultimately wasn't what we were looking for - we'd submit a request and it would take 4 days to get mailed out, and another 2-3 days for recipient (US) to receive.
