You Too Can Be a Pilot!
June 29, 2016   Karen Bartram

Let us get you started with Informed Delivery now!

We are happy to be able to tie your next campaign into the USPS Informed Delivery pilot currently being conducted in the New York City area and Northern Virginia, and soon expanding to Washington DC and Maryland.  One day we believe this will be a Big Deal channel to boost direct mail response – you can begin to test it today. Informed Delivery (or ID, for short – we know…) is a USPS program that sends images of today’s mail pieces to enrolled consumers in a daily email.  As mail travels through the postal system, it is photographed by sorting equipment.  With ID, the Postal Service is capturing those images and leveraging the capabilities of Intelligent Mail to create an email that once a day delivers images to consumers who sign up for the program, so they can see what is being delivered to them that day.  They are black and white images, and flats are not yet included, but still – pretty cool. Here’s the really cool part:  Mailers can opt to have the black and white image of their mail piece replaced in the email with a clickable color ad.  So now you get two touches for the price of one.  Early testing has been impressive, but it is still a very limited pilot.  But now YOU can participate, and we can help you. If you create a digital ad that complements your campaign, we will work with the Postal Service to have that ad appear in the email to people who are receiving your mail piece.  The Postal Service is not currently charging for this service.  It is in pilot today, with very limited participation, but there has been no advertising yet by the Postal Service to publicize the service.  There are approximately 80,000 households enrolled in the NYC area, or about 1.3% of the available households.  The pilot expands to Maryland and DC in the fall.  Again we expect fairly low enrollment to start, but probably better than NYC.  The program is scheduled to roll out nationwide in the first half of 2017, and then we expect it will be publicized – a lot.  So if you start participating in the pilot you can test some of your exposure on a limited basis, to get a sense of what works and how well. Feeling like a pioneer?  There’s not a lot of cost and effort involved – you do need to have a landing page, which is generally part of a multi-channel campaign anyway.  We’ll help you create it.  You will need a digital ad to appear in the email, and you’ll need a web address for that ad – we do NOT encourage using your home page, although it is OK to use a landing page that is part of a current campaign.  If you’re interested, we’ll get you the technical specs and get it rolling.  We’ll also provide tracking tools so you know how response is.  It’s a little pilot today, but we expect it to get big fast.  Contact us at SnailWorks for details, and you can be on the cutting edge of direct marketing.

Home