Informed Delivery and the ID Promotion – Trainwreck?  Nah.
July 22, 2019   Dave Lewis

As the USPS Informed Delivery promotion approaches, we thought it might be a good idea to clear the air on what is working, what isn’t working, and the general health of the Informed Delivery (ID) program.  There seems to be a lot of alarm and rumors surrounding the program.  At SnailWorks we are creating campaigns and generating reports virtually every day.  We know the system well, warts and all. Informed Delivery is, of course, the USPS program that allows consumers to receive greyscale (black and white) images of the mail that will arrive in their mailbox that day.  They can get the images by email or by logging into a USPS web site or mobile app.  Mailers have the option of replacing the grayscale image with their own color image, and adding a clickable call-to-action button called a Ride-Along Ad.  This is known as an Informed Delivery Campaign.  If you’re unfamiliar with the program, you can read about it here. USPS is also running a promotion to give mailers a 2% discount for creating ID Campaigns for their mailings, to encourage use of the program.  It runs from September 1, 2019 through November.  It has rules – people don’t like rules. By USPS standards, this program has taken off like a rocket, with more than 17 million subscribers as of July, and adding around a million a month.  The program really just came out of pilot a little over a year ago.  There are certainly some growing pains that the Postal Service is struggling to overcome. The first issue to arise was a largely untested, unperfected user interface that lives in everyone’s favorite place, the Business Customer Gateway (BCG.)  The UI is easy enough to navigate once one has mastered the BCG, and creating campaigns there is fairly straightforward, but it can be very buggy – it can take a long time to create a campaign, the system may drop you as you are in the middle of creating one, and, to reiterate, it is sloooow.  As such, it is frustrating.  Generating reports can be similarly frustrating – it takes a long time, and every report must be generated one campaign at a time, and then must be downloaded one campaign at a time.  If you are running a lot of campaigns, this can be frustrating.  On the plus side, the quality of the data is pretty good – it just takes a lot of time and effort to get it.  The user interface is just not built for volume. Another issue associated with the campaign creation process is the association of campaigns to IMb serial numbers.  The UI only allows for contiguous numbering of pieces in a campaign.  You provide a beginning number and an ending number, and all of the numbers in between will get the ad.  If your process does not allow for sequential numbering – for example if you assign IMb values before you presort or create splits – you will have problems with this.  Each campaign must be a discrete sequence of serial numbers.  This doesn’t work well with some processes, and is a limiting factor for some mailers, but will be addressed as the program develops.  It is not a defect, per se, but a yet to be developed feature.  Ultimately, mailers will be able to create campaigns as part of their eDoc process, assigning unique campaign ID’s to individual pieces, but the program is not there yet. This brings us to the next issue – campaign creation alternatives.  Today, most campaigns are created in the aforementioned campaign portal in the BCG.  More than 90% of campaigns.  The rest are created in the eDoc process.  In a perfect world, this will save some mailers time and effort, reducing dependence on the campaign portal.  ID is not the perfect world.  The reality is that many campaigns created this way fail – about 70% as of June.  The reasons for failure vary, but generally lie with the mailer and a very, very sensitive system.  The Postal Service is working hard to make this process tenable, but it is unlikely to be so in time for this year’s promotion.  That said, campaigns can be created in the Campaign Portal with no harm done to the mailing – but it does need to be done, and it is an extra step. Participating in the promotion has its challenges as well.  Not all mail is included:  saturation mail, EDDM, and periodicals are not eligible, as well as most DDU entered mail.  These are categories of mail that do not lend themselves to the program in the judgement of the Postal Service.  Similarly, mailers who cannot sequence their IMb serial numbers will have a hard time participating.  There are a lot of timing and approval constraints that are challenging, and restrictions on campaign content that we don’t necessarily love – but those are the rules.  For many, many mailings these constraints are not an issue – for others they are.  We believe a lot of mail will qualify, certainly enough to make it worth the effort.  Read the full promotion requirements from USPS (2019 Informed Delivery Promotion). Finally, there are delivery system issues – who will see your ad.  These fall into two primary categories:  image delivery, and triggering.  The fact is, the Postal Service is having a tough time gathering and distributing all of those greyscale images – it’s a ton of data – so consumers can see them.  Generally, Monday, or the first day after a postal holiday ID notifications may be missing some or all greyscale images.  The Postal Service is working desperately hard to get this issue resolved, and we expect to see substantial progress by August.  Interestingly, it seems that ID campaign ads placed by mailers do show up on those “no-mail” days.  This problem doesn’t harm mailers doing campaigns specifically, but it hurts the public credibility of the program. Triggering ads has to do with how mail is tracked, and what tracking “events” will trigger an ad.  USPS has been hesitant to adopt certain “assumed” events as a trigger, so flats, in particular, have had triggering issues.  The Informed Delivery program is working with the Informed Visibility team to try to improve this.  It is difficult to quantify the full impact of this, but this has more to do with policy than capability. So, is Informed Delivery sound?  Should you participate in the promotion?  Should you use ID as part of your direct marketing strategy?  Yes, yes, and yes.  Informed Delivery is an imperfect program that is working hard to get better.  The additional impact of color ads and clickable buttons on response rates cannot be ignored.  The promotion offers a 2% discount for a low-cost add-on.  Of course you should do it.  The program is not as easy to work with as it could be or should be, but USPS programs are complicated by nature.  That’s why organizations like SnailWorks help people create these campaigns.  To learn more about working with SnailWorks to setup and provide reporting on your ID Campaigns, click here. In the future, you will be able to create campaigns as part of your eDoc.  You will be able to personalize web links and use non-sequential numbers.  Businesses will receive ID notices along with consumers.  The program will be better, but it is pretty good already, and ready to roll.

Home