USPS’ Informed Delivery Full-Color Marketing Option

For the last several years, I have watched the “growing up” of the United States Postal Service’s Informed Delivery Service, which provides mail recipients with an email, in-app or on-dashboard preview of the mail arriving in their mailboxes each day. Not only is Informed Delivery growing in subscribers, but it is expanding in services. 

The USPS has long allowed marketers to add a small color ride-along (advertising) image and campaign hyperlink below the grayscale scans to create multi-channel campaigns. Subscribers can click on the hyperlink or ride-along image to respond to the offer before the physical piece arrives. The USPS is now allowing marketers to replace the grayscale scans with a full-color “representative” image instead. Because representative images do not have the address area, this provides for more space for messaging and design, and because it is essentially a digital ad, it allows mailers to do split testing of offers, as well. 

While the replacement of grayscale images with full-color images might seem like a slam dunk, this isn’t necessarily the case. In a case study provided by the USPS, one marketer — Bono’s Pit Bar-B-Q, a Florida-based restaurant chain —decided to split test the grayscale scans with the representative image. Everything else about the campaign was otherwise the same. While we might expect the color image to have out-performed the grayscale scans, the opposite was true. The grayscale scan outperformed the representative color image by 35%. 

Bono’s attributed this result to the color image detracting from the colorful banner/response URL underneath the image. While this is one possibility, the other possibility is that the representative image clearly wasn’t a mail piece but an ad, which actually depressed response. In fact, in its August 2020 Informed Delivery Overview, the USPS reported that, after comparing the response rates of thousands of Informed Delivery campaigns, the representative images consistently under-performed the actual grayscale scans. Specifically, campaigns using the scans had click-to-open rates 13% higher on average than those using full-color ones.

These results give us insight into what is potentially an interesting dynamic. Mail recipients sign up for the service because they want to see what mail is arriving in their mailboxes. They aren’t expecting to see an ad, which is what the representative images are. It may be that subscribers don’t like it. The fact that Bono’s experience mirrored that of many other marketers suggests that this is more than a color image detraction issue. There may be something deeper. 

That data is one year old, and when the USPS updates its report, we may see different results. Either way, the takeaway is the same — don’t make assumptions about what works. Test everything instead.