The Future of Multi-Channel?
May 30, 2017   Dave Lewis

What an Informed Delivery campaign might look like…and why you need SnailWorks Informed Delivery was the star of the show at the National Postal Forum in Baltimore last week. Megan Brennan, the Postmaster General, said that consumers were signing up for the service at a pace of 10,000 households a day.  As the Postal Service begins to actively advertise the program, expect that pace to grow.   In a couple of years, 10%- 20% of US household could be signed up for Informed Delivery – maybe more, particularly if it becomes a native app on new smart phones, a very real possibility.  With these kinds of numbers, adding Informed Delivery into your marketing mix becomes a necessity. So let’s put on our Jetson-style spacesuit and take a step into the future. While you’re walking Astro on your floating treadmill, your smart phone vibrates and tells you your mail for the day is available for viewing.  Oooo…there’s a renewal notice for Sprocket Monthly coming in the mail, but you can click on the image of the mail piece and it will take you right to the site for the magazine.  Your renewal is already filled out – you just need to apply your thumbprint to prove it’s you, and you’re renewed.  Going back to the day’s mail you see that there’s a 20% off coupon coming for your favorite restaurant – and it you click on the mail piece image you’ll get an extra 10% off.  You click on it and a personalized coupon appears on your phone.  Cool – you’ll use that later in combination with the coupon that will be in your mail.  There’s some other mail coming, too, but it’s just some black and white images – probably bills.  You’ll sort through those when you get home. Forget the Jetson-style spacesuit and the floating treadmill – this is not that far in the future – we’re talking late 2018 or 2019. Maybe sooner.  We’ll let you keep Astro, though. Informed Delivery just rolled out in April nationally, and has fewer than two million households signed up so far – but, as we said above, that number will grow. You can already have “ride-along” images when your prospects are getting a piece of mail from you.  Getting these images into the system is still a largely manual process, and cannot yet be personalized at a piece level, but the Postal Service promises that that is coming.  The Mail.Dat record is being modified to allow a unique URL to be assigned for each mail piece, so you can embed a PURL in your Informed Delivery ride-along.  That way, when a prospect clicks on an image in their Informed Delivery email, they can go to a pre-populated landing page, and you’ll be able to track them.  This adds a powerful new touch point to your mail marketing – and all you need is a street address.  You do not need their email address – the Postal Service already has it.  And the open rate is exceptional on this message, even as an email – the Postal Service claims 70%, which seems reasonable considering the nature of the email, and the public credibility of the USPS. As more and more households sign up, the possibilities are endless. Some things you may be able to do:
  • Allow customers to click on a ride-along to pay a bill. With fingerprint security and phone-based payment systems this could a tremendous money saver;
  • Fundraisers can also receive donations directly from a click on the image, while still delivering the mail piece to the home for more traditional check-in-the-envelope donors;
  • Online catalogs can be customized to the individual, and be linked by the PURL in the mail.dat. The prospect clicks on the image in their Informed Delivery email and are linked to their custom catalog. They can also reach the catalog by scanning a QR code on their mail piece when it is delivered. The important point is that they still get the catalog.
The possibilities go on and on. The only limiting factors at this time are how quickly USPS can get consumers to enroll, and how well mailers can manage the coordination and knowledge required execute such a complex campaign. At SnailWorks we’re already developing systems that will allow us to manage these campaigns easily for our users. We will assigns PURLs associated to specific IMb’s, host landing pages with URLs that identify where the prospect came from, and provide our award-winning dashboard that allows you to track all of your results from a single page.  Our clients will get the most from Informed Delivery. Informed Delivery is not without challenges and controversy, as we have discussed in earlier issues. Still, it is a reality and mailers who leverage its capabilities will be in a much better position than those who don’t.  We’re ready today to help our customers take advantage of this exciting new technology. Contact us to find out how. Click here to learn more. https://www.usps.com/business/informed-delivery.htm

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