The Business Case for Informed Delivery®

The Business Case for Informed Delivery®
July 26, 2018 Dave Lewis

In case you’ve been living in a cave for the past year – you haven’t, have you? – Informed Delivery is the relatively new USPS program that sends grayscale pictures of a consumer’s mail to them the morning their mail is to be delivered. Wily marketers can replace those grayscale images with full color images to get an enhanced marketing message out. They can even include a web link. As of today, USPS has a little over 11 million consumers enrolled – 7% - 8% of the US households, depending on how you count. That’s 7% - 8% of your or your client’s prospects that can get a second touch through ID. OK, those are the basics. So I had a reseller ask me – “What’s the business case? Am I leaving money on the table by not participating?” Great question! Let’s take a look: The Cost Side ID does not cost a lot. The Postal Service charges $0 for it, and has pledged to keep the current services at that price. That’s a pretty appealing price. There is set-up work to be done. You can do that yourself or have SnailWorks help you – it’s not super-difficult, but most of our clients appreciate the help – we don’t charge a lot and we do it every day. Your client does need to create an image. When I say we don’t charge a lot:

If you just do representative images - replace the grayscale with a pretty color picture, no web links, we’re generally charging $25 - $35 to set it up for you. That’s based on you doing this for a few jobs a month.
If you want to add web links, and a clickable ride-along image, add $100 - $125.

That’s it. It’s just a set-up – there are no per-thousand charges. Of course you can add all sorts of multi-channel bells and whistles for more money, but that’s not really what these campaigns are about. The Revenue Side You are probably safe marking up these prices 100% - maybe more. Clients are getting something concrete for their money – an additional contact with their customer. If you have a small shop doing 50 mailings a month and can get just representative images added at, say $65 to 20 of those mailings, you can add revenue of $1,300 versus a direct cost of $600 – so you can get an additional margin of $700 for the month. This is a very low effort sell. Most of our ID clients are adding a web link – it’s really the best value, particularly at $0/M. Take those same 20 jobs at $250 each and you have revenue of $5,000 versus a direct cost of $2,600. The Bigger Picture Informed Delivery needs more subscribers to be truly effective. Still, the Postal Service is promoting it heavily in the mailing community, and generating some buzz. Getting a head start seems like a good idea. A few general observations:

This product is sticky. Virtually all of our mailers that have started using it continue to do so;
Clients like it. They are generally seeded on their lists, so they see their own ads and get very excited about it;
Expect the program to continue growing. There will be an expectation that mailers can provide the service. It’s pretty easy to be innovative on this one;
If you are mailing larger jobs, the no-cost-per-thousand side of this makes it a very easy sell;
The platform on USPS will get fancier, with better reporting and more options than you want. USPS always drifts towards making things more complicated. You can stick to the basic offering, have happy clients, and get a little extra revenue.

Want to do an ID campaign right now? Get an image from your customer (click here for specs) and click here – fill out the form and we’ll walk you through it. It's super easy and quick, my mother in-law completed it in less than 5 minutes; let us know how you do! See you on the web!

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