The US Postal Service is running a promotion offering incentives to mailers to utilize an Informed Delivery campaign.

Source: USPS

Mailers who mail between September 1 and November 30th, 2019 can realize a 2 percent discount on postage as well as the ability to engage digitally with recipients to further increase the impact of their mailings by using Informed Delivery.

So, what is Informed Delivery?

It’s a consumer-facing feature that provides mail recipients the ability to preview, via email, the letters, and packages that will be arriving in their mailbox each day. Letters and packages are scanned by the USPS and an image of each piece’s mailing panel is sent as a daily digest.  Consumers love it to keep a pulse on what’s arriving each day.

But, did you know that Informed Delivery goes much further than simply notifying consumers of what’s set to arrive in their mailbox? It also increases engagement and response. Mailers can, for free, link those images or even supply enhanced images featuring a live link to a URL. This increases engagement with your messaging and moves consumers to the digital space easily.

This means that even before someone picks up their mail after work, they can click the link associated with your mailing and make a purchase or inquire. Pretty impressive. The best part is that there’s no fee to utilize Informed Delivery and during this promotion, you can save an additional 2 percent on your postage.

Informed Delivery is popular.

There are 17.5 million registered users and 12.5 million of them receive daily digests of the mail that’s arriving in their mailbox.

Is there really a 2% discount on my postage rate?

Yes! If you’ve got a mailing planned for September 1 through November 30th, you can take advantage of this promotion.

Why should you consider utilizing Informed Delivery?

  1. Offers an email open rate that is more than twice the industry average.
  2. Generates multiple impressions of just a single mail piece.
  3. Drives consumer response and engagement.
  4. Gives mailers the ability to reach the consumers digitally – just by knowing their physical address.
  5. It can potentially increase the return on the investment of a direct mail campaign.
  6. Informed Delivery provides additional data so that you can begin to optimize your marketing spend in the future.

There are several campaign elements that are required in order to utilize informed delivery. But don’t worry, your MailSmart Logistics team will help you with all of them, but here’s a top-level list of what you need to run an Informed Delivery Campaign:

  1. MID (Mailer ID) on your mailpiece
  2. IMb Serial Number Range
  3. Size/shape of your mailer (flat, letter, postcard)
  4. Campaign Dates
  5. Target URL
  6. Whether or not you want to utilize a Representative Image (full color depiction of the mail piece which can replace the scan of the actual mail piece, if the mailer chooses this option… for the promotion, this image needs to closely replicate the real mail piece and must be pre-approved by the USPS) or a Ride-Along Image, which features a strong call to action and a link.

Interested in testing out Informed Delivery during this promotion?

We’d love to help you save 2 percent on postage while increasing engagement. Please get in touch with us right away so we can make sure that we can get you into the queue. The promotion runs from September 1 through November 30th.

Drop us a line and we’ll be in touch!