In October 2024, we cast a skeptical eye at the USPS’s Informed Delivery Service. Sure, there are tens of millions of users, but with the free interactive  campaigns, which allow mailers to add custom full-color images (which are less and less like the actual mailpiece and more like advertising images), we wonder if users are getting weary. Not of seeing the black-and-white images of their mail arriving that day (the original concept behind USPS Informed Delivery), but having to hunt and peck for them amidst all the marketing. 

USPS Informed Delivery takes the black-and-white images of the mailpieces as they are scanned and inserts them into a Daily Digest email. Postal customers can sign up for these emails at no charge. Mailers can also include custom full-color images (they used to be called “representative” images) as part of the business program. These images used to be essentially four-color versions of the mail pieces themselves. Over time, however, they have become less and less representative and more like the type of image you’d see at the top of a marketing email.

Still, Informed Delivery is growing. Back in October, with the June 23–24 update, there were 62.9 million users and 41.8 billion impressions. Today, with the January 24-December 24 update, there are 70.3 million users and 44.5 billion impressions. Saturation is up from 31.8% of U.S. households to 33.7%.  

Even as these numbers grow, the open rates continue to decline, dropping from 63.9% in Q2F24 to 54.8% today. While that’s still 7.8 billion opens, it’s also a drop of 17%. When there is that kind of drop-off over a lengthy period of time, one must ask why.

There are factors such as stricter spam filters, emails addresses going out of date (although you would assume that Informed Delivery subscribers would sign up again under their new email address), and the compounded effect of unengaged subscribers over time.

But is that enough? Or are postal customers simply becoming tuned out to the increasingly sales-y nature of these emails?

There are two types of interactive campaigns: basic and dual (which includes an accompanying digital ad). Basic campaigns (24% of all Informed Delivery campaigns) have a .26% click-through rate, while the dual (76% of all campaigns) have a .3% click-through rate.  

Thus, the overtly advertising campaigns do out-perform the less sales-y ones. But if the sales nature of these campaigns causes people not to open the email at all, then that undermines, to some extent, the increase in click-through rate. Is it possible that the open rates for Informed Delivery’s Daily Digest emails will eventually fall to the level of all marketing emails?

Then again, maybe the drop in Daily Digest open rates have nothing to do with advertising images at all. Maybe it has to do with the fact that, for many people, the mail doesn’t arrive the day the Daily Digest does. So if it’s doesn’t accurately prognosticate, what’s the point?