Set up Informed Delivery For Every Piece of Mail You Send (Using Stampede).
Why it matters: Every piece of mail your shop sends is a missed digital marketing opportunity if it does not have an Informed Delivery campaign attached to it.
The big picture: USPS Informed Delivery puts a trackable email impression in front of the recipient before the physical piece lands. That click data, tied to delivery and downstream conversion, is what modern marketing clients increasingly expect from their mail partners.
What's at stake:
- Free high-value email impressions on every drop
- Postage discount eligibility through USPS promotions
- Attribution data that holds up in a budget conversation
The bottom line: MSPs who make Informed Delivery standard on every job are able to offer their marketing clients something meaningfully better than a delivery confirmation report.
If you are running mail for clients and not activating Informed Delivery on every drop, there is a good chance you are leaving value on the table. The process does not have to be painful, and the upside shows up in places that matter to your clients and your business.
Why Bother
- Extra email impressions, at no additional cost. USPS delivers a preview of the physical piece to the recipient's inbox before the mailpiece even arrives. Open rates on Informed Delivery notifications run above 60%. Your client did not pay for that touchpoint, and it makes the overall campaign work a little harder.
- Real engagement signals before the piece lands. When a recipient clicks the ride-along image in their Informed Delivery email, you know they engaged before the physical piece arrived. That gives you something more useful to report back on.
- Postage discounts are worth checking. The USPS postal promotions program rewards mailers who run qualifying features, and Informed Delivery participation can contribute to eligibility.
- More to talk about with your client. Walking into a campaign review with email open data, pre-delivery click activity, and downstream conversion tied to a mail event is a more substantive conversation than a delivery confirmation report.
- Stickier client relationships. When your clients can see their mail program producing digital attribution data through your platform, the relationship becomes harder to commoditize. You are providing something that takes real infrastructure to deliver.
How the Other Options Compare
The USPS portal is free and official. If you have the bandwidth to log in, build the campaign, upload creative, and get it approved for every job you run, it will get the campaign submitted. The limitation is that it does not connect to your tracking stack. A click on the ride-along image in the portal is just a click. In Stampede, that same event is the first point in a timeline that runs from inbox impression through physical delivery through QR scan through purchase, tied to a real IMb and tracked through the USPS Intelligent Mail API from start to finish.
Some of the larger mail software vendors have Informed Delivery tools as well, typically inside on-premise applications running on Windows desktops. They can get a campaign submitted if the workflow cooperates, though getting there from a tablet on the production floor may not be straightforward. The tracking generally stops at submission, with little connecting mail events to marketing outcomes.
Stampede is browser-based and works anywhere. It treats Informed Delivery as one piece of a connected tracking workflow rather than a standalone feature.
Worth saying clearly: Stampede is not a replacement for your existing presort software or your IMb generation process. Whatever you are running today, keep running it. Stampede is a separate platform built for a different job, serving the marketing clients who want end-to-end tracking and a reporting experience that goes beyond operational data. Your production workflows stay the same. Stampede adds a layer your marketing clients have not had access to before.
Stampede Makes It Fast and Consistent
Most MSPs do not activate Informed Delivery on every job because the process, done manually, takes more time than production schedules allow. Stampede is built to make it routine.
- Informed Delivery campaigns launch in minutes directly from the platform, for every drop
- AI-assisted image creation is built in, so you are not waiting on a client to send assets
- Dynamic QR codes are generated at pre-press and connected to real-time scan tracking
- Delivery data, email impressions, scan events, and downstream conversions all live in one place
- White-label dashboards go to your clients under your brand
When it is built into the workflow, it happens on every job without anyone having to make a separate decision about it.
Stampede is the Direct Mail Operating System for mail service providers and agencies. Start free at stampedetracks.com.