PebblePost grew up in programmatic. PostPilot grew up in lifecycle. If your retention stack can fire an email, PostPilot can fire a postcard off the same trigger. No tag, no audience build, no quarter-long onboarding.
Klaviyo, Shopify, Recharge, Gorgias, Attentive, Iterable, and Braze are native. Anything else? Webhook it through our open API.
Every send carries a randomized holdout. iROAS is the difference between mailed and held-out groups, statistically significant or it doesn't ship.
You don't need an agency to run direct mail with us. Our team scopes the program, designs the cards, and runs the calendar with you.
Programmatic platforms were architected around audience pixels and CPM economics. Retention runs off events: a customer abandoning cart, a subscription lapsing past 90 days, a VIP segment getting joined, a replenish window coming up. Mail should fire off those events the same way email and SMS already do. (Mail can do that.)
If you've ever sat in a programmatic mail demo and watched the rep open a media-planning UI when you asked about cart abandonment, this page is for you.
Comparison reflects publicly available product information and conversations with customers who have run both. If anything below is out of date, tell us and we will fix it.
| PostPilot | PebblePost | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | DTC operators and lifecycle marketers running retention end to end. | Programmatic media buyers and agency teams running prospecting at scale. |
| How mail gets triggered | Native integrations with Klaviyo, Shopify, Recharge, Gorgias, Attentive, Iterable, Braze. Open API and webhooks for everything else. | Cookie and IP-graph audience targeting via a tag on the site. |
| Time to first send | Days. Most brands send their first campaign inside week one. | Tag deployment, audience build, and programmatic onboarding before the first send. |
| Creative and strategy | In-house team designs every campaign, plus templated formats on request. Included. | Self-serve or via an agency partner. Buyer brings the creative. |
| Attribution | Randomized holdouts on every campaign. iROAS reported with statistical significance. | Matchback-based attribution. Holdouts not standard. |
| Retention coverage | Win-back, replenish, post-purchase, VIP, browse abandon, cart abandon, churn save, subscription pause. | Primarily site retargeting and prospecting audiences. |
| Formats | Postcards, Cardalogs, handwritten cards, scent strips, catalogs. | Postcards. |
| Volume to start | Low minimums. Automate from the first trigger fired. | Higher programmatic minimums and audience-size thresholds. |
| Pricing model | Per-piece. No platform fees, no media-buy markup. | Enterprise contracts. CPM-style media-buy economics. |
| Who runs the program | A dedicated CSM and your lifecycle team. | Your media buyer or agency partner. |
Every tool in your stack is a direct mail trigger. PostPilot Flows watch your Shopify, Klaviyo, Recharge, Gorgias, Attentive, Iterable, and Braze events. API Triggered Campaigns extend the same pattern to anything that can fire a webhook.
A customer abandons cart on Tuesday. A postcard hits the doormat on Friday. The same trigger that fires your email now fires a card with the same offer, the same code, the same creative DNA. One source of truth across channels.
MailMatch retargets recent site visitors with a postcard, the same way Meta retargets them with an ad, only with 90 percent open rates and no auction to compete in. SiteMatch extends the pattern to net-new prospects who match your customer profile.
The difference from a programmatic mail platform is operational, not technical. The audiences live alongside your retention flows, the cards inherit your retention creative, and the iROAS reports back into the same dashboard your CSM and your lifecycle team look at every week.
Most direct mail attribution is a polite work of fiction. Matchback inflated to make a media buy look better than it is. We bake holdouts into every campaign because we want to know what actually happened, and so do your finance and analytics partners.
A randomized slice of your audience does not get the mail. We compare conversion, AOV, and revenue between mailed and held-out cohorts. The number we report is iROAS, statistically significant or it doesn't ship. That is the only number worth budgeting against.
Mailed 4x less volume. Drove more converters, more orders, and nearly the same revenue once attribution was based on holdouts, not matchback.
iROAS reported with statistical significance against a randomized holdout, across a quarter of replenish and win-back flows.
From kickoff to first card in market, including creative. Most lifecycle marketers see results inside their first measurement window.
No. A lot of brands run PostPilot for retention and keep a programmatic partner in place for top-of-funnel prospecting. We will help you set up a head-to-head holdout in your first quarter so the spend allocation is a data decision, not a vendor pitch.
Days. Most lifecycle teams send their first PostPilot campaign inside week one. Native Klaviyo and Shopify connections take an afternoon.
Our team designs every campaign in-house. You get a Figma, you mark it up, we ship it. If you have a brand team that wants to own creative, we will provide templates and specs and stay out of the way.
Every campaign carries a randomized holdout. We compare mailed and held-out cohorts on conversion, AOV, and revenue inside a defined attribution window. The reported iROAS is the difference, with a confidence interval attached.
Shopify, Klaviyo, Recharge, Gorgias, Attentive, Iterable, and Braze are native. Anything that can fire a webhook can trigger a card through our open API.
Per piece, with volume tiers and no platform fee on top. We will quote a program for your retention flows in the first 30 minutes of a discovery call.
A 30-minute walkthrough with one of our retention strategists. We will pull your Klaviyo flows, sketch the postcard layer on top, and give you a programmatic-vs-PostPilot model on real numbers before the call ends.