The United States Postal Service is making it even easier to get into multichannel marketing. Just send mail. Yes, that’s it—send mail like always, and you are automatically doing multichannel marketing. This is because, through the USPS’s free Informed Delivery service, mail recipients can sign up to receive a daily digest with images of the mail that will be arriving that day. How does this work? When the mail is processed, it is scanned through the USPS’s postal equipment, which captures images of the front of each mailpiece.
When people sign up for the service, the USPS compiles those images into an email digest format that alerts recipients to what mail is on the way. You get a double touch without doing anything extra.
The Informed Delivery Digest images are black-and-white, but you can enhance your marketing exposure by adding your own color images and a hyperlink to a campaign landing page. This is also a free service (for now) and allows you to track your results, offer coupon codes to tie revenue back to your campaign, and lets people respond to your promotion immediately, even before their mail actually arrives in their mailbox.
As of right now, more than 16 million people have signed up for Informed Delivery, and the service offers some impressive results. It boasts an email open rate of 62.7%, and, according to a report in Target Marketing magazine, a 4.92% click-through rate on ads.
How do you take advantage of the opportunity?