Mailing Services > Informed Delivery

Informed Delivery® service, a revolutionary product of the United States Postal Service, has transformed the way business marketers reach and acquire customers. USPS Informed Delivery is one of the core direct mail services offered by SunDance to give your campaigns a unique additional advantage.

The Ongoing Value of Direct Mail

No other organization in the U.S. has a keener interest in making sure that direct mail remains effective, affordable, and successful than the United States Postal Service. The USPS has kept pace with the evolving mailing needs of commercial business to help you reach target customers and achieve the results you desire. The fact is, the U.S. Postal Service is the linchpin of direct mail and direct marketing in the U.S.

With the added value of Informed Delivery, the USPS effectively delivers your marketing messaging in printed letters, postcards, packaging, or a combination of formats, along with an innovative digital aspect that offers online tie-ins and interactions that add unique power to your direct mail initiatives.

The Proven Success of USPS Informed Delivery

Informed Delivery became available throughout most of the United States in 2017. Forward-thinking commercial printers and packagers steadily embraced the program after realizing the innovation and value it could bring to their clients’ marketing efforts.

• Due to its effectiveness, adoption has grown to a record 58.23 million USPS Informed Delivery subscribers as of mid-2023.
• In August 2023, more than 17,300 direct mail campaigns and 2,262 packaging campaigns were completed using Informed Delivery.
• Related digital tie-ins resulted in email open rates in excess of 63% — every marketer’s dream

Clearly, the results generated by Informed Delivery speak for themselves, and in no uncertain terms.

How Informed Delivery Makes Marketing More Powerful

Informed Delivery allows marketers to easily connect their direct mail campaigns with digital marketing programs, enabling you to follow the progress of each campaign in detail.

Through the USPS Informed Delivery secure online portal, marketers can see exactly how and when their customers are interacting with their campaigns. There’s also a USPS mobile app for added convenience. Over time, the Informed Delivery program develops a goldmine of data that provides marketers with high-value advantages, including:

• Learning what messaging, materials, and offers work best for each target group in your audience base,
• Creating more successful campaigns and tie-in offers going forward, and
• Optimizing your marketing budget to get more out of every direct mail campaign.

More than half of business decision-makers (56%) rely on this type of data, either completely or primarily, to guide their customer experience strategies, according to recent research from Forrester.

Optimizing Mail Campaigns by Integrating Customer Data

Marketers, and the commercial printers and mail houses who support them, have access to a wide range of data about their target prospects and buying customers. This data can be used across channels, in a variety of ways, to make the most of each mailing initiative.

Following are a few examples of how various customer data can be used to add even greater value to your Informed Delivery mail campaigns.

• Social media: When you analyze which content your readers like most, and understand why, you can incorporate that messaging style into a direct mail piece and digital tie-in to reach and connect with new customers.
• Product reviews: If you collect customer reviews of products or services, take advantage of these in your direct mail pieces. Messaging like “Here’s what your peers are saying about us” adds relevance and intimacy to your campaigns.
• Message effectiveness: All experienced marketers evaluate their initiatives to determine which marketing messages are most effective in getting customers to take the desired actions. Informed Delivery makes it easy to incorporate the most effective messages into your direct mail and digital tie-ins, and then track the results.
• Audience segmentation: If you are able to segment your audience by specific demographics such as generation or age group (e.g., millennials), professional niche (e.g., business women), or geographic location, as a few examples, you can create more specific messages that will resonate on a more personal level. Which makes your direct mail campaigns all the more effective.
• Response Tracking: By analyzing which offers and tie-ins generate the best responses, you can develop future mail campaigns, direct mail pieces, and digital messaging that deliver impressive ROI

Data you collect and analyze from various marketing channels, including your USPS Informed Delivery data, adds amazing power to your direct mail marketing campaigns and ensures they reach the right targets at the right time to produce the right results.

Informed Delivery provides a unique advantage for marketers who want to take their mail campaigns to the next level. It’s repeatedly proven to be highly effective, and chances are good that one or two of your competitors are already using it to conduct more powerful campaigns. Why should they have all the fun, and get all the glory?

SunDance is a USPS Informed Delivery Expert

SunDance has leveraged the value of USPS Informed Delivery almost since its inception in 2017. Our in-house expertise in direct mail campaign design, printing, packaging, mailing, tracking, and analytics supports the objectives of Informed Delivery to ensure the best possible outcome for you and your marketing initiatives.

As an innovative printing, packaging, and mailing company, SunDance is committed to using proven technologies and tools that enable marketers to be more efficient, more effective, and more successful. Take a few minutes to watch this informative tutorial on the USPS Informed Delivery program. Or better yet, contact us for a free consultation about how this innovative program can transform your marketing and deliver the results you’ve dreamed about.