The USPS launched two exciting services with similar names back-to-back – Informed Delivery and Informed Visibility. The naming convention might be confusing, especially to Mail Service Providers, but it showcases the impressive improvements the postal service continues to make by adding more value to its platform.
In fact, one in five households have an Informed Delivery participant, offering an exciting cross-channel marketing opportunity that most marketers aren’t taking advantage of quite yet.
You can learn more about Informed Visibility in another post we did, but today we’re covering Informed Delivery and its benefits.
How Informed Delivery Works
USPS Informed Delivery provides consumers with notifications covering personal postal deliveries through emails, a dashboard, and the Informed Delivery mobile app that can be viewed from home or elsewhere.
How that information gets delivered is through postal workers using equipment to feed mail pieces into an automated sorting system and scanner that generates grayscale images of your mail. Those scans can then be seen from the app, dashboard, or by signing up for USPS’s Delivery Daily Digest emails before they’re delivered.
Today, Informed Delivery is widely available to residential addresses and eligible PO Boxes in most ZIP Codes throughout the U.S. And while it isn't available to businesses quite yet, the service is continuously expanding by offering it to more customers and other regions.
Currently, 89% of people who use Informed Delivery are satisfied or very satisfied with the services it offers.
If you're interested in signing up, you can join the millions of people taking advantage of this service by visiting the USPS website. Best of all, it is free!
How Businesses Use Informed Delivery
Mailers and mail service providers participate by conducting Informed Delivery Mailing Campaigns. Mailers create campaigns through a portal, which Jet Mail can set-up and manage.
For mail pieces not associated with an Informed Delivery campaign, recipients can still see mail delivered to their home – even if someone can't get to a mailbox that day.
The program offers quite a few benefits to businesses using it to support direct mail marketing objectives. For example, suppose you, as a mailer, create an Informed Delivery campaign associated with a specific mailing. In that case, your recipients can view an image of the mailing along with a personalized banner with a targeted URL promoting the offer before it arrives at their home.
In other words, the program offers an additional touchpoint with a customer by synchronizing cross-channel campaigns to allow the recipient to see the mailpiece digitally and physically. What’s more, recipients will see the Informed Delivery mailing displayed first among all mail sent that day.
Mailer / Mail Service Provider Participation
Any company can launch a campaign as long as their pieces are automation compatible and contain a valid Intelligent Mail Barcode. Mailers can create campaigns using:
Informed Delivery Portal: mailers enter mail campaign information located within a mailer’s USPS Business Customer Gateway.
Informed Delivery in Action
When digital and direct mail campaigns become synchronized, marketers found:
- 63% increase in response rates.
- 68% increase in website visits.
- 40% increase in conversion rates.
One of the best parts of running a cross channel Informed Delivery campaign is that it allows businesses to run tests to make data informed decisions to reach results like those.
For example, Bono's Pit Bar-B-Q wanted to run a cross channel marketing campaign that drove more clicks to their website by using a direct mail campaign with Informed Delivery. They mailed out a $10 off postcard with a coupon code to customers, which was scanned by the postal service and sent out as an email. Their customers were then able to see the coupon code before it arrived and the physical piece once it got to their mailbox.
However, they wanted to test if a colorful ride-along image would deliver more results than the grayscale scan. The end result showed that the grayscale scan had a 35 percent higher click-to-open rate compared to the color image, which they believed was because the black-and-white scan didn’t distract from the colorful ride-along image.
Split testing like this highlights the versatility around how marketers are using Informed Delivery to encourage customer engagement. At Jet Mail, we can set up and manage campaigns like this one to improve your direct mail marketing by making data informed decisions. This means we have the capability to tell you:
- How many people may receive your marketing mail.
- How many people opened your Informed Delivery email or used the dashboard.
- How many people clicked on your banner ad and visited your website.
We can also pre-run a mail list to provide the number of Informed Delivery participants prior to mailing.
Informed Delivery Best Practices
Running a successful direct mail marketing campaign that takes advantage of Informed Delivery services always produces better results when you know how to synchronize them with your digital channels.
In our blog, 3 Tips for Using Informed Delivery as Part of Your Direct Mail Marketing Strategy, we covered a few critical steps to take when preparing to launch a new campaign. Those tips included:
- Take advantage of banner images, ads and links.
- Include clear and engaging CTAs.
- Deliver consistent messaging across campaigns.
- Measure results with customer data.
To increase your chances of converting a customer, we help our clients by knowing the full scope of what it takes to design and execute a successful cross-channel marketing campaign that leverages the benefits of Informed Delivery.
USPS Informed Delivery Statistics
If you’re still on the fence about the benefits of Informed Delivery, we wanted to include a list of important stats provided by the USPS.
Informed Delivery® Quick Facts:
- Number of registered users = 33,400,000
- Number of new weekly user registrations = 495,000
- Number of email-enabled users = 27,700,000
- Total mailer/Mail Service Provider participants = 1,932
- Total brands represented across all industries = 10,680
- Active Informed Delivery mail campaigns = 4,193
- Completed Informed Delivery campaigns = 79,933
- Email open rates of 70% (12-month average)
- 1 in 5 households have an Informed Delivery participant
How People Engage with Informed Delivery Services:
- 79% use Informed Delivery Daily Digest Email
- 11% use the Informed Delivery dashboard
- 10% use the Informed Delivery mobile app
Jet Mail: Delivering Informed Results
When Informed Delivery launched in 2017, we immediately saw the potential this service offered in improving direct mail marketing. We’ve since helped launch successful campaigns that resulted in more engagement and conversions for our customers.
Please contact us if you are interested in learning more about Informed Delivery or launching a campaign. We are here to help.
COMMENTS