Putting Informed Delivery Data to Work
October 24, 2019   Dave Lewis

I thought I knew all of the reasons Informed Delivery is great (and I do think it’s pretty great).  It turns out I may have missed the biggest one. The universally accepted benefits of Informed Delivery:

• Improved response through anticipating the mail;
• An improved response path by including a link in the Informed Delivery notice;
• A 2% postage discount, at least through the end of November.

But once people get signed up and start running campaigns, they are finding another benefit many hadn’t even thought about – ID gives you some amazing data and insight! When you send an Informed Delivery campaign, the Postal Service returns remarkable data on the results of the campaign.  Of course you’ll know how many of your prospects were ID subscribers, how many get a daily email, how many open that email, and how many clicks your ad received.  But that’s just the beginning.  With the detail reporting, you can find out exactly who those people are, and a detailed view of what action they took.  This gives you new insights into your list, and new actions you can take to optimize your campaigns. Here’s how it works:  In order to get Informed Delivery, a consumer needs to sign up for the program – take a proactive step.  This already shows a heightened engagement with their mail.  If you can identify the ID subscribers (and you can!) you are finding a more engaged audience.  If they get a daily email and open it, better still – you can get that information, too.  You will even find some homes that receive more than one email – this means that more than one ID subscriber lives in the home – you have found a real mail-loving household!  Of course, clicks are there too. Now, understand that these are not just counts you are getting back – the Postal Service provides this data at a serial-number level.  You can marry this data back to the IMb’s on your list and identify exactly who the subscribers/email receivers/openers/multi-subscribers are.  And of course, the clickers. Direct2Digital ID gives you this data in a consolidated CSV file. So what can you do with this data?  Well, here’s what some of our users have been doing:

• Sending more mail to subscribers – these folks are essentially multi-buyers. Maybe give a preference to the email openers among them;
• Sending more mail to the multi-email homes – you’re getting extra impressions for your money among highly mail-motivated prospects;
• Importing these characteristics into their CRM;
• Adding fields to their house files to contain this new data – and keeping it updated, as more folks are subscribing every month;
• Comparing results between subscribers and non-subscribers.

This is just the start – we are seeing our clients develop new ways to use this data almost daily. The raw data from USPS is a little rough to work with, but that’s why you’re a SnailWorks user – we make it easy, marrying raw data to your list, getting rid of duplicate data, and making it simple to download or schedule reports. Of course the Postal Service will not share customer email addresses with you – or even their name and address – just a list of IMb serial numbers that took an action.  If someone intercepted this data it would mean nothing to them – but to you, it’s gold!  Because you’ve got SnailWorks to put it all together. If you haven’t started with Informed Delivery yet, now’s the time.  Contact us to learn how easy and powerful it can be.

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