DirectMail.io was founded in 2008 in Louisiana by Shawn and Angelina Burst — direct mail operators who’d hit the same wall every operator hits: too many tools, too much manual work, too little visibility into what actually drove response. They built the platform they wished existed. Today, printers, agencies, brands, and franchises run on it.
In 2008, the direct mail industry was running on a stack of separate tools that nobody had ever built to work together. Design lived in InDesign. Variable data lived in a plug-in. Postal hygiene lived at a third-party letter shop. Reporting lived in spreadsheets. Every campaign was an integration project, and every integration project was where margin and timelines went to die.
Shawn and Angelina Burst founded DirectMail.io with a single thesis: the entire direct mail workflow — data, design, postal, omni-channel, automation, and attribution — could live on one platform if someone bothered to build it. Not a marketing-cloud bolt-on. Not a white-labeled aggregator of other vendors’ APIs. A purpose-built platform owned by the same team running the postal stack.
18 years later, that platform runs printers, agencies, brands, and franchises across the United States. The thesis hasn’t changed: direct mail is the highest-margin marketing channel in commercial print, and the tools running it should match.
Shawn and Angelina Burst start the company with a single thesis: direct mail is the highest-margin marketing channel in commercial print, and the tools running it are fundamentally broken.
NCOA, CASS, presort, and drop ship come online as native capabilities — replacing the third-party letter-shop tax that printers and agencies were paying.
In-browser editor with variable data and variable imaging eliminates the composition stage. Print-ready PDFs become the handoff.
Email, SMS, Meta, dynamic QR, and identity-resolution layered on the same recipient list. USPS Scan Trigger goes live: email auto-fires on the actual USPS last-scan event.
DirectMail.io receives the USPS Innovation Award at the National Postal Forum. NBC The Profit features the company on a national platform the same year.
18+ years in. Printers, agencies, brands, and franchises run direct mail end-to-end on the platform — postal, design, omni-channel, automation, attribution, and a nationwide print network.
The same people who started the company 18 years ago are still running it.
Shawn co-founded DirectMail.io to solve the structural problems printers, agencies, and enterprise marketers run into running direct mail at scale. Two decades in direct mail and marketing technology — including founding Sales360 before DirectMail.io. Tulane University alumnus, based in Louisiana.
LinkedIn
Angelina co-founded DirectMail.io and runs finance and operating discipline for the company — planning, compliance, and the platform's audited security posture (SOC 2 Type 2). Based in New Orleans.
LinkedInRecognizes platform contributions to the postal industry — specifically the integration of Informed Visibility and Informed Delivery into a unified omni-channel workflow.
National broadcast feature on the company's growth and approach to direct mail technology.
Profile coverage of the platform and its consolidation thesis for direct mail.
In-depth coverage of the platform's postal stack and automation capabilities.
Independent attestation of security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy controls.
The fastest way to evaluate the platform is a 30-minute live demo on your own list. For everything else, the channels below.
Bring the campaign you’d run. We’ll show you how it looks on the platform — postal, omni-channel, automation, and attribution all in one view.