SyncUp Episode 5: Postal – VP Alliances Ben Jablow

Welcome back to SyncUp with SwagUp! As you might have heard, we recently announced our new partnership with Postal.io. 

We’re excited about this and as a result dedicated this episode to digging into the details (demo included!) of what that means for you. 

Join our founder Michael Martocci and Postal.io VP of Alliances Ben Jablow for Episode 5: Experience Marketing in the New Normal! 

If you’re interested in a simple, convenient, and automated way to engage with your audience and create meaningful engagement, don’t miss this episode. 

Integrated with the SwagUp platform, Postal.io allows you to easily incorporate swag into your sales and marketing outreach while tracking the data all in one place.

Let’s get started!

💡 The Big Ideas

• What is experience marketing and how automation tooling is relevant today
• How the partnership embraces automation and an abundance mindset over an old school mentality and scarcity mindset
• The growth of personalization and how B2B tends to follows B2C
• How companies are shifting to platforms for using swag in sales & marketing flows
• Why the power of gifting is an important part of building a true cross-channel marketing experience

🎁  Extras

• Listen to this episode on the SyncUp with SwagUp podcast
• Watch this episode on YouTube
• Book a demo with the Postal team

Keep reading for a sneak preview of everything discussed in this podcast episode!

A Partnership Forged from a Shared Vision 

Postal is an experience marketing platform that in particular focuses on the automation tooling relevant for sales and marketing teams. The goal? Create a marketing experience by sending offline items easily, efficiently, and effectively. 

And while the company has only recently launched, they have already covered a lot of ground - with no signs of slowing down any time soon. Accordingly, the team at Postal knew they could take things to the next level with the right swag partner. In fact, intelligent partnerships are part of their business model.

“All of the products offered on the Postal marketplace are from partner vendors. Postal doesn't do logistics or warehousing, [what we do is] connect users with the products they want easily, and enable the ability to customize items and send, all from the cloud!” says Ben Jablow, VP of Alliances at Postal.io

Smart resource management is a critical skill, especially at early stage startups, and while the Postal team could have ventured into warehousing, they realized it was neither the most efficient nor the most effective approach. “The impetus for having a swag partner was not wanting to spend time or people to build out warehousing [and those] logistical processes,” says Ben. And for anyone who has had to put together swag before, the sheer amount of options in the swag industry (some good, most not so good) is a familiar hassle.

SwagUp, however, stood out. “What attracted me to you all is the API-led development [...] the ability to extend the platform in a way that a lot of other companies can't, or haven't figured out yet. And so as we talk about how to automate processes for clients, that to me was a no brainer,” says Ben.

If you’ve been with us for a while, you know that we’re more than just an ‘online swag closet.’ We do swag storage at our warehouse and help you put together high quality professionally designed swag, but the trick to powering all of this and permanently upgrading your in-house marketing closet, with a newer more efficient workflow that is 100% cloud-based is the SwagUp Platform.

Something that other companies built with an old-school, warehouse-first mentality just don’t get, and can’t help the distributed teams of today do the work they need to do.

“We want to provide a true marketing experience that kind of crosses channels. So the idea of receiving a handwritten note, a gift, swag, the ability to kind of really experience feeling a tangible item is something that we're laser focused on. [...] As we talk about automating processes for clients, that to me was a no-brainer.”

— BEN JABLOW, VP OF ALLIANCES AT POSTAL

Bringing the Swag to Experience Marketing

As companies that grow the market, SwagUp and Postal have understood and experienced the increased need for meaningful and personalized interactions — especially in today’s world. Whether with clients, employees, or community members, personalization is key to higher engagement.

“So many companies we've worked with over time [...] especially over these last six months have storage closets, and they're like, I don't know what to do. I can't utilize this anymore. I have no way of integrating these into new hire programs or to sales and marketing flows,” says Michael, “So they're starting to recognize the need for platforms like Postal and SwagUp to be able to manage this offsite in the cloud.”

The power of gifting has been around forever and people recognize how amazing it is. But how do you do that in a scalable, automated, trackable way where you have metrics? That’s where Postal comes in.

“Swag has the biggest impact when you're giving it to people that already care about the brand.”

— MICHAEL MARTOCCI, FOUNDER AND CEO AT SWAGUP

With the Postal x SwagUp integration, you have a toolkit of ways to utilize your existing swag inventory in different ways, including leverage swag to build out cadences and playbooks in your sales and marketing processes.

Ben describes four general use cases for achieving a quality ROI with swag outreach:

1. Marketing towards current customers
2. Prospecting on the sales side
3. Supporting customer success
4. Giving back and appreciating employees

On the Postal platform, users can visit the marketplace to browse and curate items for the own kind of ‘company store.’ Everything that’s approved becomes what is called a ‘Postal’ and from there, postals can be used in any playbook process, complete with triggers and cadences.

Looking Forward to the Future 

Reaching the right people with the right message at the right time can be expensive and time consuming. 

With Postal and SwagUp, you can get better clarity into the process with a lot less effort.

And if you were thinking about automating certain areas of your workflow before, now is the perfect time to start. “I don't think things will ever go back to the old normal. There'll be a new normal. You're going to see distributed workforces here for good. You're going to see companies saving a lot of money on office space just because they feel like they don't need it anymore. [And] a tool and a platform like ours that simplifies and makes things more efficient, it's certainly here to stay and the need and the value is only going to grow,” says Ben.

Swag in the future isn’t just about putting a brand logo on a product. It’s about quality and timing. “People want to do these types of campaigns,” says Michael, “They want to get swag for their employees. They want to send gifts to all their clients, but they didn't have a scalable means of doing it. 

And it always just felt like more of a pain than it was worth.They just didn't have the manpower to do it. But now with platforms like the ones that we're building, they can do this at scale. [They can now use] swag as a digital marketing campaign.”

“I don't think things will ever go back to the old normal. There'll be a new normal. You're going to see distributed workforces here for good. You're going to see companies saving a lot of money on office space just because they feel like they don't need it anymore. [And] a tool and a platform like ours that simplifies and makes things more efficient, it's certainly here to stay and the need and the value is only going to grow.”

— BEN JABLOW, VP OF ALLIANCES AT POSTAL

Want to learn more about experience marketing in the new normal? Catch the rest of this episode at the SyncUp with SwagUp podcast to see how the Postal x SwagUp partnership can help!

https://youtu.be/RL3rPhT5PbA

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