Tech Line

PFL Unveils Vision for the Hybrid Experience

By Combining Digital and Physical Marketing, Enterprises Can Create More Authentic Human Experiences to Drive Brand Affinity, Increase Engagement, and Drive Business Value

Livingston, Mont. – Feb. 16, 2022 – PFL today unveiled its vision for the Hybrid Experience, in which companies can orchestrate digital and direct mail marketing to create more authentic human experiences at scale, bridging the gap between physical and digital engagement. The COVID-19 pandemic sparked a rapid acceleration of digital transformation in the enterprise, prompting many brands to move their operations and audience-engagement tactics into the digital realm. However, digital experiences have failed to deliver on their promise to create personal and authentic interactions. As a result, customers today are demanding a more human experience from brands.  

“The key to any successful marketing, sales, or customer experience strategy today is attention,” said PFL CEO Nick Runyon. “It has become increasingly challenging for businesses to captivate audiences that are fatigued by digital engagement methods. Our ‘2022 Hybrid Audience Engagement Survey’ reveals that more than half of enterprise professionals experience fatigue due to the volume of digital promotions they receive at work. We believe that Hybrid Experiences will be fundamental to the next wave of audience engagement, combining the power and scale of digital marketing with the authenticity and effectiveness of offline direct mail experiences. Data will help drive these connections, and businesses will begin to strike a new balance between the organizational need for predictability and people’s universal need for human connection.”

Leveraging Hybrid Experiences to Earn Attention, Drive Affinity, and Accelerate the Business

As brands seek ways to improve the ROI of their marketing efforts, hybrid experiences can deliver more impactful results that earn audiences’ attention, foster brand affinity and loyalty, and accelerate sales motions and close rates for the business. Research shows that well-executed direct mail can generate a 90 percent open rate—more than five times higher than the average open rate for email marketing.  

The human connection created by direct mail also drives action and generates brand affinity, as evidenced by research that shows 75 percent of people can easily recall a brand immediately after receiving direct mail. Direct mail plays a critical role in account-based marketing (ABM) strategies to accelerate pipeline and increase close rates; in fact, 80 percent of businesses that employ an ABM strategy use direct mail as a core engagement channel.  

“Tapping into the power of PFL’s Hybrid Experience Platform for our campaigns has allowed us to create real conversations and develop real relationships, which opened up doors like never before,” said Jeff Cowles, digital marketing strategist, Medtronic. “PFL has allowed us to leverage our targeting and personalization through new channels and has provided us with extremely high returns. The hybrid experience has become the de facto standard in campaigns for accelerating and converting engagement.”

Combining the Power of Corporate Gifting and Direct Mail Automation

PFL delivers authentic human experiences by orchestrating impactful direct mail in an ecosystem fueled by data, bringing the measurement, personalization, and predictability of digital marketing to direct mail. PFL’s Hybrid Experience Platform offers deep integrations with leading customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation platforms (MAPs). Leveraging digital intent signals and behavioral data, brands use PFL to influence the timing and content of direct mail, resulting in highly integrated, orchestrated, and impactful experiences.

Runyon concluded: “We’ve seen a number of players in the Hybrid Experience category emerge to meet the market demand for impactful direct mail at enterprise scale. Until now, most technologies have focused on either direct mail automation, which brings great scalability but often lacks personalization, or corporate gifting, which offers a greater variety of direct mail options and deeper customization but can’t scale to meet the needs of modern enterprises. PFL is uniquely positioned to provide the scale of direct mail automation with the personalization of corporate gifting—resulting in a powerful hybrid experience solution for our customers.”

Learn More‍

Website: www.pfl.com‍
Twitter: @pflcom
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/pflcom‍

About PFL

PFL, a leading hybrid experience company, orchestrates physical and digital engagement for brands with their key audiences, using data to automate direct mail and create more authentic human experiences at infinite scale. The key to successful marketing, customer experience, and employee engagement is attention, but it’s hard to captivate people fatigued by digital engagement methods. PFL’s industry-leading Hybrid Experience Platform combines the emotional power of offline marketing with the measurement and predictability of digital so that brands can deliver one-to-one personalization at scale. The platform offers deep integrations with leading CRMs and MAPs, including Salesforce, Marketo, and Oracle Marketing Cloud, enabling businesses to seamlessly leverage digital signals and behavioral data to trigger physical touchpoints, with full transparency into order status and campaign performance. Leading organizations including Medtronic, Zoom, Proofpoint, and Paycor use PFL to deliver on-brand hybrid experiences that earn the attention of their core audiences, build brand affinity, and amplify business growth.  

Media Contact

Andrew Smith
Bhava Communications for PFL

PFL@bhavacom.com
+1 (310) 941-7251