Everyone loves Informed Delivery, but do you love it for the right reasons? Back when you could get a 4% discount, it may have been more about lust than love. That discount drew you in, but we see strong relationships building over the years, even as the big discount has faded. Drawn in by the discounts, mailers have started to realize that all those extra impressions really do make a difference in response rates. As you get to know Informed Delivery better, there may be more to it than you imagined. It is a very sophisticated product.
Of course, there still is a discount for using Informed Delivery. It’s not what it once was – 1% vs. 4% - but you can now claim it year-round, as long as you stack it on a primary promotion. You can just put it into your workflow without having to make a change for “discount season.” Now it’s always discount season!
Since its inception, when there were just a couple of million subscribers, Informed Delivery has grown in both scale and capabilities. We’ll touch on some of the highlights:
- 34.9% household participation
- New Informed Delivery App
- Click-to-Call capability
- Unique coding on all click-throughs allows for personalization and identification
- New data elements added for finer analysis of results and list appending
34.9% Household Participation
Informed Delivery now boasts more than 75 million subscribers in nearly 52 million households, creating a household penetration rate of nearly 35% - and growing. Households that choose to subscribe also tend to be more engaged with their mail- they’re generally your best prospects. This is a group that deserves an extra impression.
New Informed Delivery App
The Postal Service has just rolled out a new Informed Delivery app that allows subscribers to view their digest directly in the app. The app can send a push notification when the subscriber’s digest is ready. There are also some package tracking features built in, so subscribers are likely to find more uses for both the app and Informed Delivery, thus increasing the number of participants. If you haven’t already, you can download it at your favorite app store for free.
Click-To-Call Capability
This is a big deal if your most effective sales are made on the phone. The Informed Delivery program has always required that the ride-along ad link to a website, and that is still the case. But you can now also add a click-to-call link directly above the Representative image. In most cases, folks are looking at their digest on their phone – why not add a link to let them call you directly? Many businesses want to get prospects on the phone, where their sales techniques are most effective. Adding a click-to-call link adds another opportunity to get that call.
Unique Coding of All Click-Throughs
When a prospect clicks on a ride-along ad in their Informed Delivery digest, they are really clicking on a URL that will direct them to a web landing page. Informed Delivery also appends the Mailer ID (MID) and serial number from the IMb, creating a unique identity for each click. This can be treated like a PURL – identifying who has clicked on the ad. You can leverage this to track and identify interested prospects, or even to uniquely personalize the landing page to that prospect. With a little planning and preparation, you can prepopulate order forms or tailor the landing page message to an individual. Personalization is a proven way to convert web clicks into buyers.
This feature can also be turned off if your website employs applications that may have operational issues with additional information appended to the URL.
New Post-Campaign Data Elements
One powerful and often overlooked feature of Informed Delivery is the post-campaign data. The Informed Delivery program provides record-level data on all subscribers in a mailing. Each record is identified by the IMb on the mail piece, so it can be matched back to the original mailing file and identified. For any given record, you can identify if they are a subscriber to Informed Delivery, if they got an Informed Delivery email, if they opened that email, and if they clicked on the ride-along ad. You can also identify households with multiple email subscribers.
Data is now available, which tells you if they clicked on the ride-along or the “learn more” link. USPS has plans to release more data features in the upcoming new year.
There is So Much More to Informed Delivery Than You Thought
A postage discount is just the icing on the cake. Informed Delivery offers multiple tools to increase the effectiveness and response rates from your direct mail. SnailWorks offers unmatched expertise in every element of Informed Delivery from setup to post campaign reporting. Contact us to learn how we can help.