Lob.com Inc., the maker of a direct mail platform undergirded by data analytics, announced today that it is now available on Salesforce.com Inc.’s AppExchange under a partnership with developer Veezla Inc.

Salesforce.com users can use the service to send personalized letters, postcards and checks at scale without having to leave the Salesforce environment. Reporting and response metrics are also integrated into the customer relationship management user interface.

Lob provides application programming interfaces for direct mail and address verification that businesses can use to send personalized postal mail programmatically, track their status, identify returns and weed out bad addresses. Printed material can be extensively customers and include URLs and QR codes that permit responses to be tracked to individual recipients.

The company pitches its service as a timesaver, saying it can reduce direct mail workflow execution time from days to a few hours. Lob stores templates created by its customers and populates them with data that can be personalized to the individual item level. For example, mass mailings can be sent with multiple different offers for testing purposes or content can refer to the customer’s purchase history or past interactions.

Printing is distributed among what the company says is the country’s largest network of local vendors to minimize mailing time. Integration with the U.S. Postal Service’s scanning data verifies delivery, although there is no way to tell if the recipient has actually received or opened the item.

Mailings can be triggered by such factors as time and interactions logged into the Salesforce.com system, said Ryan Ferrier, Lob’s chief revenue officer. For example, an automated customer satisfaction survey can be sent 30 days after a sale is logged or medical offices can automate reminders and bills.

Lob doesn’t process packages or catalogs but specializes in postcards, self-mailers and letters. “We try to be limited on the form factors but almost unlimited on the customization,” Ferrier said. “All of the creative can be done in HTML so you can dynamically populate a million pieces of mail with images from your CRM platform,” with the choice of image customized down to the recipient level

Lob said it believes it is the only direct mail company to offer salesforce.com integration. Previously, CRM users who want to personalize printed mail have had to export data manually and integrate it with external systems. Real-time delivery visibility enables marketers to coordinate customer responses across different channels for more precise follow-up tasks, emails and calls.

The service starts at $490 per month. Lob has raised more than $83 million in venture funding, including a $50 million Series C round in February.

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