Direct mail marketing is all about big data. From identifying a marketing audience to receiving granular insights into household demographics, postal data can empower businesses to augment traditional mail delivery with powerful new technologies. In many cases, postal data can allow mailers to market more effectively through the mail than through digital campaigns by delivering a meaningful physical mail piece or sample product direct to mailboxes with high precision for target audiences and interesting demographics. Postal services can generate revenue by offering data as a service for mailers looking to improve their delivery or marketing efficiency and more insights into households, and mailers can gain a competitive edge by using unique and specialized delivery tactics.
View the Video: Unique Ways to Capture and Use Big Data to Support Your Postal Business
Presenter: Tariq Mirza, EVP of Postal Logistics Consulting
Technology Changes the Way You Do Business
Big data platforms allow mailers and posts to manage the vast amounts of new data gathered across the postal supply chain with new technologies including smart barcodes, mail analytics, Key Value Pair, XML, and RESTful web services to move, integrate and share content. Other types of data that can be gathered include sender information, recipient information, and individual household behavior, consumer behavior, including recipient availability. All identifiers allow mailers and retailers to deliver to the most receptive potential audience to see the maximum ROI on their mail campaigns.
Using predictive analytics can allow a company to use mail marketing to advertise a specific product or entire catalog to a set of households within a ZIP code that is searching for such goods—whether they are toys, office supplies, or luxury clothing items. High-quality catalogs are costly but extremely effective when delivered to the right audience. With predictive analytics, companies can ensure that only the likeliest customers receive their highest cost (and quality) print marketing materials, while also swaying potentially interested customers with highly specific coupons that provide time sensitivity and incentives to purchase.
Logit Regression data analytics can also help delivery organizations proactively manage fraud and revenue assurance leaks. Mail Owners can use the same analytics to measure a mailer and shipper’s performance and quality of service while a mailer and Shipper can identify training and process improvement actions for their companies.
How Should a Commercial Mailer Get Started?
The Postal Service implemented Intelligent Mail Barcodes, and Full-Service program through a comprehensive set of IT systems that uses one identifier to provide information about the sender, the recipient (using the eleven-digit delivery point), the service type code, delivery type, and all mailing instructions including holds, delivery dates, and signature requirements. Intelligent Mail Barcodes and Intelligent Package Barcodes in conjunction with eDocs contain massive amounts of information that allow mailers and shippers to receive incentivized and Full Service discounts and the Postal Service to save processing costs and maximize delivery accuracy and efficiency. Using scheduling information allows postal services to analyze data and save costs by identifying certain points that are not available on certain days, information that can maximize efficiency and minimize redelivery costs or missed delivery dates across the postal supply chain.
The array of available tools and technology is staggering and making sense of where and how to best implement big data, business analytics and strategy in your business can seem like a daunting task. Assurety has decades of combined experience helping the USPS and some of the largest logistics commercial entities in the US to create their digital systems and data tracking programs and has used that insight to help countless businesses navigate their postal data potential. For mailers looking to improve their customer experience or gain a competitive edge, using postal data is the best way to maximize ROI of physical goods in the digital age.
