Soon You Can Track Your Preprinted BRE’s!
January 16, 2018   Dave Lewis

This is more exciting than you think Sometimes the Postal Service really does surprise us – in a good way. We were sitting through an MTAC call about the next software update for Informed Visibility.  Whee… “…and so this will simplify the bulk updating of data feeds and entities when...blah, blah…”  It’s actually very important stuff, but scintillating?  Not so much. Then USPS started to review the new fields we can expect in data feeds with the February 17 update – now we’re having fun!   One new field is called “Piece Unique Identifier” which seemed kind of obvious – the IMb is supposed to be a “license plate for your mail” and all of that, so why is there a Piece Unique Identifier field? Well, it turns out that maintaining uniqueness of mail pieces is not as easy as it seems.  Postal sorters run at more than 30,000 pieces an hour – 9 or 10 pieces a second, so time stamps don’t help much, and not every piece has a unique IMb.  Think especially of those offset printed #9 envelopes that get sent out with every fundraising campaign.  Unless you go to the expense of spraying on a unique IMb on each one, or including a window, the barcodes all look the same.  It’s a problem we have always had with tracking replies – without unique IMbs for each piece they all look the same to our system, so it is almost impossible for us to provide accurate inbound reporting.  We will generally insist on a unique IMb on each piece to do inbound tracking. They may look the same to us, but the USPS is uniquely identifying each piece of mail through a complex assortment of captured characteristics, processing sequence numbers, and orange scan codes sprayed on the back of mail pieces.  On February 17 they will use that information to create a unique identifier for every piece of mail – even pre-printed BRE’s and RAE’s – and include it in our tracking data. This capability was news to pretty much everyone on the call – the propellers were spinning on our Postal Nerd beanies.  Now reply mail just got trackable.  The new data fields start with the February 17 update, and it will take us a few weeks to evaluate and integrate the data into our reporting.  With this new feature you can:

• Track response rates in real time;
• Prepare fulfillment caging operations;
• Verify response counts with caging;
• Identify reply mail delivery issues;

To know exactly who is responding, we still need a unique barcode – generally working with a window reply envelope. The bottom line is this – if you use Business Reply or Courtesy Reply envelopes, with a simple change to the barcode you can know exactly how many responses are coming your way, and from where.  There is just no reason not to.  Ask us how, and we’ll get you set up with the correct barcode.

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