The Resurgence of USPS® Marketing Mail®

Why Volume Is Growing Again, and Why Density Is the Rule of the Game

Introduction

For fifteen years the USPS® Marketing Mail® story ran in one direction. Fiscal year 2026 broke the pattern.

In its third quarter results, announced August 7, 2026, USPS® reported Marketing Mail® revenue up $440 million, or 12.3 percent, on a volume increase of 574 million pieces, or 4.3 percent, versus the same quarter last year. That followed the first quarter in which volume rose 7.0 percent. Two growth quarters out of three, with volume and revenue rising together, is the healthiest signal this industry has produced in a long time.

It did not happen by accident. Four forces converged.

What Commercial Mailers Need to Know Now

1. Incentives now reward growth. The Mail Growth Incentive credits volume above baseline and the Catalog Insights promotion discounted qualifying catalogs at the point of mailing.
2. Digital got expensive and uncertain. Cookie deprecation, privacy law, ad fraud, and saturated inboxes pushed budgets back toward a channel tied to a verified physical address.
3. Mail became programmable. Triggered variable data pieces, QR attribution, and Informed Delivery® turned mail into a measurable performance channel.
4. Behavioral science didn’t change. Physical Mail leaves a long-term impression and remains on the kitchen counter for days. Also, helping move the funds from digital to physical.
5. Density is how USPS® wants this growth delivered. Commingle and CoMail jobs of very large piece volume jobs are now routine, and election and peak seasons stack.
6. Software decides who keeps the growth. Legacy desktop Post-Presort tools take hours to process a mega job. AIMS^plus™ does it in minutes.

Catalyst One: Incentives Changed the Price Math

Price elasticity is thoroughly managed by the USPS® to minimize mail volume impacts, especially for products that could not sustain the price increases. Still for certain products, every rate increase pushed some marginal commercial mailers out and spread fixed costs across fewer pieces, forcing the next increase. USPS® paired pricing with volume tools to break the spiral.

1. Mail Growth Incentive. Registered mail owners earn a 30 percent postage credit on qualifying volume above baseline across calendar years 2024 through 2026, which lowers the net cost of the next campaign and unlocks test budgets.
2. Catalog Insights promotion. October 2025 through June 2026, a 10 percent discount at time of mailing for qualifying catalogs of 12 or more bound pages, no minimum volume.
3. A rate pause in January 2025 gave media buyers a predictable cost window to commit to expanded print.

Every one of these is claimed through eDoc (Mail.dat® or Mail.XML® or Postal Wizard etc.). Miss a qualification rule or submit Mail.dat® with errors and the discount evaporates. The incentive economy runs on presort and especially Post-Presort (AIMS^plus™ – Assurety™’s Integrated Mailing Software platform) Mail.dat® and Mail.XML® software management for compliance, incentives, promotions and postage optimization, logistics optimization for drop shipments and increasing brand impressions by providing a free digital marketing platform, USPS® Informed Delivery®, that reaches 80M Americans and growing 8%+ year over year. Above all, a 63%+ open rate is way above industry standards and shows the power of the USPS® brand and importance of these emails to American consumers increasing the value of Direct Mail.

Catalyst Two: Digital Fatigue and the Privacy Transition

Marketers did not rediscover mail out of nostalgia. Digital acquisition costs rose while conversion fell, ad fraud climbed, and email open rates in many programs settled below 20 percent. Cookie deprecation, mobile tracking prevention, and expanding privacy law dismantled the targeting models programmatic display depended on. Direct mail is built on first party data tied to a physical address; ad blockers and privacy toggles do not reach it. Industry research indicates that more than 80 percent of surveyed enterprise brands planned to increase direct mail investment.

Catalyst Three: Mail Became Programmable and Measurable

The volume returning to the mailstream is triggered, personalized, and attributed. Identity resolution maps cart abandonments to postal addresses and mails a variable data postcard within 24 to 48 hours. QR codes on more than half of pieces close the attribution loop. Informed Delivery® turns one mailpiece into a physical touch and a digital impression with no added media spend. Several industry research centers report the following:

Metric	Physical Direct Mail	Email	Display
Typical response rate	Approximately 4 to 9 percent	Well under 1 percent	A fraction of 1 percent
Media lifespan	Days to weeks in the home	Seconds	Instantaneous
Targeting basis	First party address	Opt in email, cookies	Third party cookies
Attribution vulnerability	Low	High	High

Catalyst Four: The Behavioral Science Never Changed

The USPS® Office of Inspector General, with Temple University’s Center for Neural Decision Making, used eye tracking and fMRI to compare physical and digital media. Physical pieces engaged the brain regions tied to value more strongly, were processed with less effort, and were recalled more accurately. And recent industry research finds that Generation Z, saturated with feeds and spam, responds to physical mail more than any other cohort.

The Density Reality

Here is the fact that ties everything together. USPS® is rewarding density: deeper containers, fuller pallets, more destination entry to SCFs, fewer handlings. That is where the postage savings live for the commercial mailer and the efficiency lives for the network. So, consolidators, comminglers, copalletizers, and large printers are pooling volume, and multi-million piece commingle and CoMail jobs are standard operating procedure. Election mail, political mail, and peak season do not spread these jobs out. They stack them.

The old desktop based legacy Post-Presort software layer never caught up.

Workload	Legacy desktop software	AIMSplus™ – Beyond Desktop. Beyond Limits™
Mega jobs, 30-40M pieces	10-15 hours	Minutes
Standard daily runs	Hours of lag	Seconds to one minute
Election and peak surges	Jobs queue, entry windows at risk	Platform absorbs the surge
Infrastructure	Local per site servers, per seat and desktop installs, downtime	Single install, browser based, on premise
Data ownership	Third party exposure	Fully yours, AI implementation ready

As Kim Brennan of FireBird who replaced her Post-Presort software with AIMS^plus™ noted that her Commingle jobs of 70M+ pieces that were taking 19 hours with old legacy desktop based Post-Presort software are now completing processing in a few minutes with AIMS^plus™ is a high value for commercial mailers as the size of the job will continue to increase due to higher density requirements. Commercial mailers sortation machines and trucks and operations folks don’t have to wait hours to get the direct mail out the door. Nineteen hours means one job consumes a production day and night while presses and trucks wait. One rerun pushes the drop ship appointment and the incentive math with it. And many alternatives require handing commercial mailer data to a third party, which forecloses your own AI roadmap before it starts.

Structural or Fluke? Software Decides

When promotions reset and rates rise, the commercial mailers who keep growing will be the ones with the lowest cost per qualified, discounted, deliverable piece. That cost is set by how much optimization your software captures, how fast it turns a dense mega job into eDoc, and how much labor and hardware it burns doing it. With the July 12, 2026 USPS® price change, USPS® effectively brought back a Catalog Incentive separate from the earlier 2025–2026 Catalog Insights Promotion. The new Catalog Incentive provides a 10% postage discount for qualifying catalog mailings. These are opportunities requiring a partner not a vendor who is willing to work with commercial mailers to automate their postage optimization and compliance processes and workflows, investing in commercial mailers success through continued technology and solutioning innovations in AIMS^plus™ and TrackingAssurety™ for commercial mail tracking needs. Assurety™ is just that a partner that listens and takes action to meet the needs of our clients every time.

AIMS^plus™ : Built For the Density Era. Beyond Desktop. Beyond Limits™