Omnichannel marketing is supposed to mean all channels — a unified strategy that creates a consistent customer experience across every touchpoint, digital and physical. But most teams treat it as a digital-only play: email, social, paid ads, maybe SMS. Direct mail rarely makes the list. That's a missed opportunity.
A 2021 Omnisend analysis found that marketers using three or more channels earned a 494% higher order rate than single-channel campaigns. Direct mail drives higher response rates than most digital channels — and the four companies below prove it. Here's how they used direct mail alongside digital channels to increase retention, boost product adoption, and maintain compliance.
CPH uses direct mail to increase their customer retention rates
CPH provides malpractice and professional liability insurance for small events and mental health practitioners. Most of its operations — policy issuance, rate calculations, customer service — run online.
As a managing general underwriter (MGU), CPH is required to let policyholders choose their correspondence channel. Many choose direct mail. And beyond compliance, CPH found that direct mail consistently outperforms other channels for driving policy renewals.
"We've decided not to go completely electronic, as having a multi-channel engagement strategy increases our retention rates," says Ameet Shahani, CPH's Director of Technology. "For example, some people will take that postcard and hold onto it until they are ready to renew...And everybody has enough email."
The problem: sending reminder notices to CPH's 130,000 customers via direct mail required three full-time employees and dragged out workflows across the organization. To send direct mail to 130,000 customers without a three-person team, CPH needed automation.
After partnering with Lob, CPH cut its campaign lead time by 98% — from a two-week turnaround to less than one hour. That speed means renewal reminders go out within hours of triggering, not weeks. And faster outreach means more policyholders renew before their coverage lapses.
Resistbot uses direct mail to reach politicians
Resistbot is an intelligent message router, a service that autonomously takes the text messages sent to it, transcribes them into physical letters, and mails them to politicians.
Resistbot relies on digital channels — its app, Instagram account, and blog — to generate interest and engage users. But the channel that actually delivers the message? Direct mail.
Politicians are buried in emails, phone calls, and social media mentions. A physical letter lands on a desk and stays there — digital messages get buried. It gets read by staffers. It's harder to ignore than another entry in an overflowing inbox.
To send so much direct mail, Resistbot uses Lob's Print & Mail API. With Lob's automation platform, Resistbot can handle sudden surges — like sending 100,000 letters to a single politician after the official unplugged his fax machines. And in 2018, Lob helped Resistbot send 10,000 voter registration forms.
Realeflow increased product adoption with direct mail
Realeflow is an integrated SaaS marketing platform built specifically for real estate investors. Its users build search-optimized websites and run email campaigns through the platform. But historically, direct mail generates more leads for real estate investors than most digital channels.
Realeflow offered direct mail features, but they were slow and hard to use. Designing, copyediting, and sending mail to printers took weeks. Typically, Realeflow users couldn't gauge the effectiveness of their mail campaigns for two to three weeks.
After integrating with Lob, Realeflow gave its users direct access to direct mail features — template libraries, flexible letter sizes, bulk image uploads, and developer support — all built into the platform they were already using for digital marketing.
Accounts using Realeflow's Direct Mail tool jumped 200%, and direct mail campaigns created on the platform surged 300%.
MeridianLink helped customers stay compliant with direct mail
The business intelligence and data analytics company MeridianLink, formerly Saylent, provides financial companies with first-party customer data for targeted marketing campaigns.
MeridianLink's clients use digital channels to engage their customers — but for regulatory compliance, direct mail is non-negotiable. The problem was speed. MeridianLink's customer experience team spent six weeks per quarter manually building and managing direct mail campaigns for 250 to 300 clients. One regulatory edit could add days or weeks to an already tight timeline.
After partnering with Lob, MeridianLink automated the campaign build process. Campaign data flows in, mail goes out, and if a last-minute compliance edit comes through, the team updates Lob's templates and routes the campaign for review — without restarting the entire process.
Thanks to MeridianLink's partnership with Lob, the company's clients can send compliance mail in days instead of weeks.
"Lob created a more efficient process with more flexibility and saves everyone time and resources," says Laura Costello, MeridianLink's Product Marketing Director.
Add direct mail automation to your omnichannel strategy
The pattern across all four companies is the same: direct mail drove renewals, met regulatory requirements, and increased feature usage — but only after they automated it. Manual direct mail takes too long and requires too many people — it can't match the speed of your digital channels.
Direct mail earns its place in an omnichannel strategy when it's orchestrated with email and digital channels — sharing the same data, triggers, and timelines. Disconnected channels mean customers get conflicting messages or miss them entirely. Connected ones turn more prospects into buyers and bring them back.
If you're running omnichannel campaigns without direct mail — or running direct mail without automation — you're missing revenue. Start a free trial of Lob and see what changes when direct mail runs as fast and tracks as clearly as the rest of your marketing stack.
Frequently asked questions
FAQs
Q: What is omnichannel marketing?
Omnichannel marketing connects all your channels — email, social, direct mail, in-store — so customers get a consistent experience regardless of where they interact with your brand. The goal isn't just being active on multiple channels. It's making every touchpoint feel like part of the same conversation.
Q: What is the difference between omnichannel and multichannel marketing?
Multichannel means you're active on more than one channel. Omnichannel connects those channels so data and messaging flow between them. With multichannel, each channel tends to run independently. With omnichannel, the data and messaging from one channel inform the others. A customer who ignores an email might respond to a postcard. omnichannel strategy accounts for that. Multichannel usually doesn't.
Q: What is an example of omnichannel marketing?
One clear example: CPH Insurance uses direct mail alongside digital outreach to reach policyholders who prefer physical correspondence — a deliberate choice that lifted their retention rates. Another: Resistbot converts text messages into physical letters mailed to politicians, turning a digital input into a physical output as part of one continuous experience.
Q: What is the main disadvantage of omnichannel marketing?
Complexity. Coordinating messaging, timing, and data across multiple channels takes integrated systems and shared data — and most teams underestimate that. Adding channels without connecting them means customers get conflicting messages. The teams that succeed don't just add more channels. They build systems that let channels share data and trigger each other based on customer actions. That's why direct mail automation matters: it removes the manual bottleneck that usually stops teams from including physical mail in an otherwise digital strategy.
Answered by:
Sam Melero
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