Level-up your marketing powers with this free and easy tool.
Want more bang for your marketing buck? Let’s talk about why combining direct mail with USPS Informed Delivery® could be your new double-duty secret campaign weapon.
First: What is USPS Informed Delivery?
Informed Delivery is a free service that allows USPS subscribers to digitally preview their incoming mail and manage their packages. Say you’re vacationing in the Bahamas (lucky!): Just check your email or USPS smartphone app, and you can see what’s on the way to your mailbox at home.
What is Informed Delivery for business mailers?
With the right setup, organizations who enroll in Informed Delivery for Business Mailers can manage what USPS customers see and experience when they receive previews of their mail – and what it can do for response behavior.
Say you’re launching a postcard ad. If you did nothing at all, your mailer would arrive as a grayscale digital image in USPS Informed Delivery subscriber portals (a benefit in and of itself, as we’ll explain in a moment). However, if you were to set up and proactively manage a free Informed Delivery for Business Mailers account, you could make it so your digital preview appears in full color, complete with interactive elements strategically equipped to drive traffic straight to your website.
The benefits of Informed Delivery
Let’s start with the obvious: Informed Delivery gives you two chances to reach your audience and make an impression – once at the inbox and another time at the box on the curb.
That’s a big deal, and it partly explains why some of today’s top-performing brands – like Modcloth, Warby Parker and Quip – put so much emphasis on direct mail campaigns.
Turns out our inboxes have spent the past decade quietly becoming incredibly noisy places. So much so that, according to Vox, consumers are regaining trust in the mailbox, while viewing more of their email as junk (how ironic). This is a phenomenon that’s corroborated by research from the marketing group Go Inspire, which found that campaigns combining direct mail and digital performed up to six times better than email alone.
Of course, you would never give up email marketing and its unique abilities – like creating digital experiences, enabling real-time campaign analytics, instantly reaching a huge audience, etc.
If only there were an easy way to combine direct mail and email in one fell swoop …
The best of both worlds
With Informed Delivery for Business Mailers, you basically get two campaigns for one: Your bold, beautiful mailer – expertly designed and printed to glossy brilliance – will head straight for the mailbox; meanwhile, as long as you take the time to set up your Informed Delivery campaign correctly, your mailer will gain digital superpowers, morphing into an image complete with clickable calls to action that can direct traffic straight to your pages.
How to set up Informed Delivery
Here’s an important point.
Just about anyone can sign up for an Informed Delivery account for free. But organizations that want to make the most of the service should take the time to design an Interactive Campaign. That’s where you set up your mail preview with a full-color image and interactive elements, like URLs. This might take a little expertise, but skipping this step really only gives you part of the benefits of this powerful tool. Firespring’s experts can help you set up your Informed Delivery for Direct Business Mailers campaign when we print or design your mailer.
The conclusion
USPS Informed Delivery is a powerful, free campaign tool that – especially when done the right way – can elevate your campaign results. Do your organization a favor, and take some time to explore this double-duty marketing strategy.