Save Money on Direct Mail Marketing
Each year, the United States Postal Service runs promotions throughout the year to incentivize businesses and organizations to get creative with their First Class and Marketing Mail campaigns. You can encourage your customers to take their marketing to the next level with direct mail and save money doing it.
To enhance your postal savings, help your customers think about saving money by using lighter basis weights and higher bulk papers. For example, 7-point and 9-point reply cards meet all the postal requirements for caliper and are bulkier with higher yield because of the specific type of specialty pulp used to make them. However, they are lighter, making them less expensive to mail. And reducing basis weights--using 75# paper vs 80# paper, for example--has little effect on the quality of the direct mail but can provide a 6% yield advantage and a 6% weight advantage, resulting in postal savings.
Many of the 2024 postal promotions are a perfect match for reply card, uncoated and coated papers. Your customers can combine these money-saving tips with next year’s postal promotions and reduce their postal spend allowing them to mail more often.
The most significant incentive for 2024 is a proposed 30% discount on additional first-class and marketing mail relative to their mail volumes in 2023 (over 1,000,000 pieces). This could result in significant savings for large-volume mailers. Click here to learn more and work with your print provider to ensure you can qualify.
Here are a number of other incentives to watch for at the post office in 2024:
Tactile, Sensory, and Interactive Mail Piece Engagement
This promotion encourages mailers to enhance customer engagement through innovations in paper and stock, substrates, inks, interactive elements, and finishing techniques.
New developments in paper and paper stocks, substrates, finishing techniques, and inks can be incorporated into mail pieces to create a multi-sensory experience through unique visual effects, sound, scent, texture, and even taste! Features like pop-ups, infinite folds, and other dimensional treatments encourage interaction and drive customer engagement.
Each part of this promotion is eligible for its own 5% discount.
Specialty Inks showcase the future of communications. Qualifying inks include conductive inks, which are electronic device-activated and printed battery-powered circuits; thermochromic inks--colors and dyes influenced by temperature; photochromic--dyes influenced by light; and metallic and reflective inks.
Sensory treatments employ any sounds, smells, touches, tastes, or sights to engage audiences. Scent features can include flavors and fragrances applied as a varnish or coating, scented labels, and ambient scents. Sound features can include paper that incorporates sound chips or speakers. Taste features can include paper that incorporates edible components. Qualifying visual features include paper with special effects like filters, holographic stickers, and lenticulars. Textural features can include spot gloss, gloss stock, embossed papers, and more.
Interactive Elements engage recipients with dynamic three-dimensional integrations, creative folds, and cut-outs.
Personalized Color Transpromo
This promotion encourages mailers to highlight marketing messages through the use of color, dynamic variable print, and personalization. Color messaging incorporated in bills and statements enhances the value of First-Class Mail pieces by fostering a better connection and response from consumers. Utilize a reply mechanism (BRM/CRM) to further engage with customers and collect these responses. The Sonoma 7 or 9-Point Reply Card is a perfect example of a solid Business Reply paper option (call out).
For a 3% discount, use full-color marketing and data visualization on your bill or statement. For a 4% discount, include a business or courtesy reply mechanism.
Emerging and Advanced Technology
This promotion, which now includes mobile shopping, encourages mailers to incorporate emerging technologies such as enhanced augmented reality, mixed reality, virtual reality, NFC, video in print, and mail integration with voice assistants or mobile technologies that facilitate convenient, seamless online shopping experiences.
For a 3% discount, include enhanced augmented reality, basic integration with voice assistant, or mobile shopping. For a 4% discount, include a host of emerging technologies such as video experiences and virtual reality.
Reply Mail IMbA
By adopting Intelligent Mail® barcode Accounting (IMbA®), Qualified Business Reply Mail™ (QBRM™), and High Volume QBRM™, customers can improve visibility, while also delivering easier payment methods and faster delivery speeds.
For a 3% discount, businesses can enroll in IMbA and use a static barcode with their QBRM. For a 6% discount, businesses can use serialized barcodes.
Informed Delivery®
This promotion encourages mailers to use the USPS Informed Delivery omni-channel feature. ID enhances the mail experience nationwide by providing eligible residential and personal PO Box™ consumers with a digital preview of their household’s mail. Business mailers can use this simple but effective preview opportunity to engage users through an integrated mail and digital marketing campaign that generates additional consumer impressions, interactions, and insights.
For a 4% discount, mailers can include a ride-along image to call recipients to action, a digital sample of the mail piece, or a live URL embedded in the mail piece.
Retargeting
This promotion incentivizes marketers to send out personalized postcards to recent website visitors who didn’t convert. It is an effective multi-channel marketing tool that engages already interested browsers. The process involves matching either the visitor’s IP address to a website or an app to a customer’s physical address. Triggered automatically by an organic digital interaction, retargeted direct mail is a dynamically printed, targeted message sent to a customer’s home via First-Class Mail postcard.
Eligibility includes First-Class Mail postcards and includes a 5% discount.
Direct mail is considered a highly effective, tangible, and personalized marketing strategy. With these discounts and incentives from the USPS, your customers can be even more successful in their efforts while saving postage at every turn. The more you guide them, the better results everyone will see.
Get an overview and calendar of the 2024 USPS promotions and incentives programs here!