USPS Informed Delivery Part IV: Top Ten Things for Commercial Mailers

First, a brief overview on our earlier articles on Informed Delivery.

Part I: Should Commercial Mailers Be Scared of Informed Delivery and Hybrid Digital Mail? We discussed concerns of Commercial Mailers around the new communication and marketing platform from USPS called Informed Delivery.

Part II: Hybrid-Digital Use Cases for Businesses, Where we explained multiple industry use cases for Informed Delivery.

Part III: Managing Informed Delivery Through the Mail.dat Specification, Where the focus was on helping the operations staff at an MSP or marketer who manages Mail.dat in support of payment and verification processes, and who may be in charge of marketing management in the same jobs.

In this Part IV of the Informed Delivery article series, we are talking about leveraging Informed Delivery eligibility and a process for getting informed delivery discounts on mailings.

To encourage mailers to adopt Informed Delivery and upgrade their internal processes to support Informed Delivery, USPS has introduced an incentive-based promotion for mailers. In this article, we are highlighting the top ten things you as a commercial mailer need to know to make the most of this promotion.

Up until now, the Informed Delivery program has around 17.2 million subscribers with an informed delivery email open & read rate of over 60% across 13,000+ campaigns sent for almost 2500 brands.

In order for Mailers to take advantage of and participate in the Informed Delivery Promotion starting from September 1^st to November 30, 2019, here are the top ten things you need to know:

1. Mailers must register in BCG via the Incentive Program Service to participate in the Promotion.  For MSPs, PostalOne! will enroll their clients into the Promotion based on the Mail Owner information submitted in the eDoc.
2. Mailers should contact the USPS Informed Delivery (ID) eDoc Support Team and set up testing before the promotion period. This will allow time to test and make sure that campaign data submitted via eDocs is valid and creates and activates valid campaigns.
3. Only MID- and Serial-Ranged Based Informed Delivery Campaigns qualify for the Informed Delivery (ID) Promotion.
4. Non-automated mail, saturation mail, DDU, EDDM (Retail or BMEU) mail, DAL flats, mailing sent to business addresses only are NOT eligible.
5. The discount MUST be claimed at the time of the mailing during the promotion period (9-1-19 through 11-3-19).  Discounts cannot be rebated after the Promotion closes.
6. Threshold Rule – Mailers need to account for spoilage when calculating the threshold of 99% needed to receive the promotional discount.  The percentage will be applied by the volume of pieces on statement compared against the volume of one or more MID-level campaigns or one or more serial-range based campaigns.  In other words, for a Serial-Range Based campaign, there must be a corresponding mail piece MID and IMb serial number range that matches (within 1% of the total volume claimed on that postage statement) or exceeds the Postage Statement volume claiming the incentive.
7. The CCR file must be populated with the PI indicator and be submitted via Mail.dat and Mail.XML jobs in order to receive the discount. If the CCR file is not submitted with the Mail.dat or Mail.XML jobs, the incentive will not be applied.
8. The Campaign Start and End Date must include the mailing date for the postage statement/mail pieces claiming the ID Promotion discount.  Therefore, Informed Delivery Campaigns must be created and inactive status PRIOR to the mailing. If the campaign is not submitted and inactive status before the mailing is sent to PostalOne!, the discount will not be applied.  For Mailers that submit campaigns at the same time as the mailing through PostalOne!, make sure that the start date of the campaign is at least one day before the date of the mailing and postage statement.  If campaigns are created in the MCP, make sure the campaigns are created and inactive status before submitting the mailing through PostalOne!.
9. If submitting campaigns as part of jobs through PostalOne! and the campaigns fail due to errors involving the content of the campaign data (start date in the past, ride-along image is the wrong size or format, etc.), then the promotion will not be applied.
   If campaigns fail and are not created via PostalOne! submission, the only other way to receive the promotion would be to manually enter the campaigns via the MCP.  If this happens, the Mailer will be responsible for manually creating the campaigns in MCP to receive the discount.  PostalOne! must have the campaign data from MCP in order to process the mailing with the promotion incentive applied. If the systems have not had enough time to process and transfer the data from MCP to PO!, then the incentive will not be received.
10. Make sure campaign start and end dates allow enough time for delays in mail reaching customers.  Also keep in mind that for First Class, mailings must be inducted at least 4 days prior to the Campaign End Date.  For Marketing Mail, mailings must be inducted at least 9 days prior to the Campaign End Date.

USPS’s Informed Delivery omnichannel platform is here to stay! Commercial Mailers can start reaping the following benefits as soon as they adopt it.

• The ability to deliver better service to their customers and the end-consumers.
• Send clickable marketing content with the email notification to the consumers and increase revenues.
• Better transparency in the postal process
• The ability to track the performance of a campaign

Assurety can help with your transition to Informed Delivery. Using Assurety’s Integrated Mailing System ( AIMS ^plus™ ), Mailers can create, update and manage Informed Delivery campaigns and facilitate Informed Delivery promotion incentives from USPS by creating Informed Delivery promotion eligible campaigns.

This is how AIMS ^plus™ can help you manage your Informed delivery Campaigns:

• Supports both Component driven and Piece barcode-based campaigns
• Automation support for creating Informed Delivery campaigns through csv files & regular expressions
• Supports serial range based, MID based and personalized (PURLS) campaigns.
• Create, modify & manage your campaigns
• Create campaign jobs with just campaign only information (HDR, RMS & RMB) or with presort data (HDR, SEG, CSM… RMS, RMR)

AIMS^plus™  AIMS^plus™  is a centralized, web-based mailing solution that empowers mailers to automate their Informed Delivery campaigns through templates, and to automate and integrate with the PostalOne!, FAST, Seamless Acceptance, Informed Visibility (IV) and Informed Delivery (ID).

To learn more about the benefits of using AIMS^plus™, contact us here. Or call 866-750-4924.