By Joanne Volkert, jvolkert@lessitermedia.com
Marketing Manager, Lessiter Media
Last fall, the United States Postal Service® (USPS) launched Informed Delivery, a free digital service available to residential consumers that allows them to digitally preview their letter-sized mailpieces and manage their packages scheduled to arrive soon. Informed Delivery is an optional notification service that makes mail more convenient by allowing users to get a digital preview of what is coming to their mailbox via email. Greyscale images of the exterior, address side of incoming letter-sized mailpieces arrive each morning in a users email inbox via USPS’s “Informed Delivery Daily Digest.” See examples below. With the USPS offering innovations like this, do you think this would bring life back to direct mail campaigns? Do you think this would benefits your current direct mail efforts?
There are approximately 7,852,533 Informed Delivery registered users nationwide with 3,139,022 acting as email enabled users – and these numbers continue to grow each day. Informed Delivery is available to eligible residential consumers in the majority of ZIP Codes™ across the country. See if Informed Delivery is available in your area and sign up here.
How It Works
How it Benefits the Business Mailer
Informed Delivery offers mailers an unprecedented opportunity to engage with current or potential customers through synchronized direct mail and digital marketing campaigns. Mailers can now provide a full color representative image to replace the greyscale image, supplemental content, also known as a ride-along image and URL, that shows below the mailpiece allowing users to engage digitally. For example, taking advantage of a promotional offer immediately, renewing a subscription or paying a bill.
Each campaign is triggered by and mapped to a Mailer ID (MID) that is used on the mailpiece in addition to the Serial Number range within the Intelligent Mail® barcode (IMb®) which can be customized to be active during a specific date range. Informed Delivery gives mailers the opportunity to have multiple impressions from a single mailpiece (digitally and physically). Keep in mind that multiple users can be registered at one household, so one mailpiece can be delivered to multiple individuals digitally should they be active Informed Delivery users. On average, the email open rate for the daily digest is over 70% - more than twice that of the industry average.
Informed Delivery offers the potential to increase the ROI on direct mail spend while also providing mailers additional data insights to optimize their marketing spend. Post-campaign Summary Reports are generated and can be downloaded providing mailers with the number of users/mail recipients that were sent an email, the email open rate and the number of click-throughs. A post-campaign detailed report is also available providing line level detail of the counts in the Summary Report using 5-digit ZIP codes. A Pre-Campaign Analysis Report is an optional report for mailers that allows them to evaluate their campaign reach prior to launch to see how many Informed Delivery users there are within a particular mailing list.
What is the User Response?
There are two ways to submit an Informed Delivery campaign:
- Mailer Campaign Portal - Officially launching in March 2018.
- PostalOne!® - Contact the PostalOne! support team at USPSInformeddeliverydoc@usps.gov for more information.
For more information about Informed Delivery or to download or view more detailed resources on this new service, visit informeddelivery.usps.com or contact USPS’s support team at USPSInformedDeliveryeDoc@usps.gov.