Origin Story

It all started back in 2015. It had been a rough decade and a half for us direct mail pros.  And lingering slightly below the surface of the incessant “print is dead” story line, was the irrefutable fact that innovation in building audiences for direct mail was non-existent.  It had been 25 years since the first database cooperative was launched, and despite all the advancements in technology, nothing much had changed.

So, we started thinking about how we might alter that dynamic, and understood that we could use our digital marketing expertise to reinvent traditional direct mail.  To succeed, we needed to do two fundamental things:

• Migrate the modeling skills we had developed over the past 20 years from a transaction-based environment to an intent based mindset, using the wealth of data website visitors leave behind every day. This wasn’t so hard.
• Figure out how to match unknown site visitors to postal names and addresses in a privacy compliant way. This was very hard, but we figured it out.

And that’s how NaviStone® was born. 25 adventurous clients signed up for our first prospecting test in Q4 of 2015.  Not only did the test names respond well, but we learned that the names we were generating for clients were 90-95% unique when matched against traditional transaction based lists; this was a real breakthrough!

Today, NaviStone® offers a number of products that leverage website visitor browsing behavior to generate direct mail audiences, including our original campaign prospecting product, a turn key personalized postcard program, and a hotline data feed to support existing daily and weekly hotline programs.