USPS Informed Delivery Part II: Hybrid-Digital Use Cases for Businesses, eTailers, Retailers, Government, Politicians, Universities, Nonprofits, Marketers, Healthcare, and More

In the first part of our series on USPS Informed Delivery, we described the new communications and marketing platform and discussed commercial mailers’ concerns surrounding it. Our synthesis was that hybrid digital, digital marketing, and digital communication are here to stay and mailers should look to increase their ROI by utilizing the Informed Delivery platform in innovative ways, offering their ideas and services to mail owners and businesses. This is a new platform in its infancy and needs the support of the industry to take it to the next level of big data analytics over time. Also, in the future, parcel tracking can provide more opportunities as the platform matures and is scaled to the needs of sophisticated marketers.

In this article, we will outline several simple use cases for different types of businesses and objectives, all adding value and helping to reach clients and consumers digitally. Mailers can start with simple scenarios and then over time collaborate to have USPS scale the platform for big data analytics.

Our next article will focus on Mail.dat specific use cases, and the final piece in this Informed Delivery series will explore the pre-mailing saturation and density and post-mailing analytics. Measurement is key for commercial mailers and mail owners to understand hybrid digital ROI and to improve their customer service, marketing, and sales CRM databases. Stay tuned!

In this video, Founder and CEO Shariq Mirza provides an overview of Informed Delivery use cases across the public and private sectors.

Value

First, the value to participant businesses and commercial mailers according to the year 2019 user survey:

1. 16.4 Million registered users exist today for Informed Delivery.
2. 11.5 Million users are enabled for email notifications.
3. 164,000 new users are getting registered every week and USPS’s goal is to start registering 500,000 new users every week.
4. To-date, as of May 8, 2019, over 10,705 campaigns have been completed by commercial mailers utilizing their post-presort software.
5. Over 2,068 brands have been represented through the digital platform.
6. The bottom line: multiple multi-channel impressions and calls to action and increased conversion are the end result of Informed Delivery.

Informed Delivery Use Cases

Now let’s talk about some use cases:

1. Lobbyists and Politicians – Politicians can access stakeholders both via mail and digitally asking for votes, donations or support for a cause. Can more effectively push local, state and national governments on issues important to civil society (or their own political ends).
2. Banks and Financial institutions – Banks can reach out to customers through mail and through digital content, allowing them to order checkbooks, apply for credit cards, and apply for mortgages online. It can provide calls to action on fraud detection and late payment reminders.
3. Higher Education Institutions – Universities and colleges can reach out and ask for admission applications. They can enable tuition payments, update of address, and can offer specific programs driven by student insights.
4. Non-profits – Organizations like Red Cross, UNHCR, relief organizations, organizations focused on medical treatment of epidemics, and social, political, and religious non-profits can all reach out to the consumers both via mail and digitally to ask for donations, volunteer time, or political and civil support.
5. Retailers and eTailers – eTailors can drive consumers directly to their website and retailers can see action taken on coupons for both online and in-store shopping.
6. Utilities and Telecoms – Utilities and telecoms can provide account management, bill payment, service activation, phone upgrade and other similar calls to action to customers.
7. Government – Local, State and Federal governments can ask for tax payments online, provide visibility into important rules and regulation changes for businesses and citizens, and invite comments on legal, transportation, or school funding initiatives and much more.
8. Technology and Product Companies – Businesses can offer service and product demos through digital while linking the marketing with physical mailers, creating multiple impressions and enabling quicker conversion.
9. Posts and Delivery Organizations – Posts can offer re-delivery, changes to delivery dates and times, and pickup scheduling offers as part of delivery of products.
10. Insurance Companies – Insurance companies can offer policy upgrades, online account management, plan enrollment, policy adjustments and tie them in with physical mailers.
11. Healthcare – The healthcare industry can utilize this technology to provide links to on-line registration forms, pre-appointment details, online bill payment, checking of accounts and much more.

These are only a few of the envisioned use cases for Informed Delivery, many of which are already in practice.

The Elephant in the room – Analytics and CRM Refinement

Postal mailing data gathering, reporting, and analytics that business entities can use to refine their marketing, customer service, sales databases is the key component. URL clicks, email openings, actual performance of call to action, exactly which images were shown to consumers are all invaluable data points. We will provide details on the Analytics in our fourth Informed Delivery article, Part IV. Point to be noted is that over time the industry needs to collaborate with USPS to get more data back from USPS to create ROI and long term value.

Contact Assurety to improve your CRM and refine your customer profiles, which are a critical starting point for effective Informed Delivery campaigns. Assurety provides technical postal consulting to its clients and its Mail.dat editor package, AIMS™, the industry’s flagship web-based Mail.dat and Mail.XML post-presort software, easily manages Informed Delivery campaigns. Contact us for consulting or a demo of AIMS.

Disclaimer:

United States Postal Service®, PostalOne!™, IMb, Informed Delivery are trademarks of the United States Postal Service®. This is not a complete list of the trademarks that are associated with the Postal Service.