While we’re talking about the 2025 USPS promotions – and we seem to talk of little else lately – let’s chat a bit about next year’s promotion for Business Reply Mail – the IMbA promotion. It officially starts on July 1, 2025, so why talk about it now? There are a few reasons.
IMbA stands for Intelligent Mail barcode Accounting. It allows the postal service to automatically charge the permit holder for reply mail postage without needing to divert the mail. It’s faster and cheaper – for the USPS and the mailer.
Right out of the gate, there is no permit fee for QBRM, where there is a $350 annual permit fee for regular BRM. For high volume reply mail, you may also encounter annual and quarterly maintenance fees of up to $3,470. If you enroll in QBRM and IMbA, there are no permit fees or annual maintenance fees. Cost per piece is at its lowest as well with QBRM/IMbA.
• Basic BRM per-piece cost: $1.88 each
• Basic QBRM per-piece cost: $.777 each
• IMbA per-piece cost: $.727 each
So, IMbA has no permit or maintenance fees, and lower costs per piece. And we’re not even at the promotion yet. Is that a good reason for getting started now?
The IMbA promotion takes quite a bit of up-front time to get ready. First, you need to participate in QBRM – Qualified Business Reply Mail. QBRM is a more automated way of managing Business Reply Mail that lowers the cost quite a bit. Then you need to get signed up for IMbA. It takes time, working with a few different folks at USPS, and running parallel before you are enrolled. But it is so worth it.
An interesting twist is that when the promotion does start in July, you will get a 3% discount on your reply mail postage for a simple BRE where all have the same barcode. If you serialize the barcodes – making each unique – the discount becomes 6%. That extra 3% is worth about two cents, or $20/thousand. There is a cost for serializing IMbs – you’ll need digital printing of some kind, but it may well be more than covered by the additional discount.
Another important benefit to serializing is that with unique barcodes it now becomes very easy to track your reply mail. You can know who is replying and when. We have customers using this today to measure response, anticipate cashflow, prevent unneeded negative actions, and more. Tracking inbound mail has the highest ROI of any mail tracking, and with this promotion the Postal Service is making it easy. Imagine having a report every morning telling you how much revenue you can anticipate. With serialized IMbs (and a little help from SnailWorks) you can have it.
Some of the biggest banks in the country are already switching over to serialized IMbs on their reply envelopes. They know the value of tracking. You should, too.
The promotion doesn’t start until July, but you can see there are a lot of other reasons to get started now. The best thing is that once you have set up your IMbA account and gotten enrolled in the promotion, the rest is easy. You’re enrolled and approved.
Need some help wading through all of this? Contact us. We can help.