Thirty-seven percent. It was a number that would not stop rattling around in the head of U.S. Postal Service VP of New Products and Innovation Gary Reblin. It represents the increased lift the average marketing campaign sees when email and direct mail are used in tandem. “What we said was, ‘What if we could give consumers an email preview every morning of what they’ll be seeing in their mailboxes that night?’” Reblin says. “We take pictures of just about every piece of letter mail that goes through our facilities. We have the capability to share a direct mail piece with end consumers through their digital devices.” What’s more, USPS can entertain the possibility of making the U.S. Mail a digital conduit for website visits and transactions.
Thus was born Real Mail Notification (RMN), the Postal Service’s Great Byte Hope, the breakthrough that senior Post Office executives anticipate will illustrate what digital-only marketers are missing by leaving mail out of the mix. The service, which sends subscribers emails at 8 a.m. with photos of that day’s mailbox contents, will debut in a pilot in New York City this fall in a co-rollout with My USPS, the Postal Service’s parcel-tracking service.
RMN isn’t likely to win any design awards. The pictures of mail pieces passing through sorting machines at high-speed are black and white. But mailers will be able to partner with the Postal Service on adding interactive options such as click-throughs to phone calls or websites. “We’re doing this to enhance the mail product; mail is not a digital product, but this product is interactive. All you have to do is give me a link,” Reblin says. “Our tests…saw a tenfold increase driving people online.”
USPS tested Real Mail Notification in a 6,600-user program in Northern Virginia early this year. Results showed that 93% of users opened their email alerts within two hours of receiving them each day. Nine out of 10 testers said they would continue using the free service were it made permanent, and 86% said they would recommend it to friends. But it’s the response rates seen during the test—albeit to USPS’s own appeals—that will make direct marketers stand up and take notice if they’re replicated on a large scale in The Big Apple. The average response rate of RMN subscribers was 5.9%, compared to 0.5% for a control mailing. Much of that (4.8%) came via click-through options, but email alert recipients were also twice as likely as the control group to type in a URL.
Because Postal Service consumer panel research shows that, in most households, one member regularly retrieves and opens the mail, Reblin is convinced that RMN will expand direct mail to a wider audience. “I was part of the RMN test and I personally found this to be true, because my wife usually opens all the mail,” he says.
New York will provide more accurate numbers of how RMN might perform on a nationwide basis, since it will be offered to residents of all five boroughs through emails and a wide-ranging ad campaign. Reblin and other senior Postal executives will be keeping close watch on how widely the program will scale. “If a mail piece gets a 20% response rate [through RMN], but only 1% of the population has it, it’s not helping anybody,” he says.
The Postal Service has partners lined up for the New York pilot, but mailers wanting to join in will be interested to know that the service is free, and will stay that way if it flies. Should RMN significantly increase advertising mail volumes, it will have served its purpose for USPS and be open to all big mailers. Reblin is optimistic that it will not only take wing, but give direct mail a needed boost.
“We think this is an idea that is going to change and revolutionize direct mail,” Reblin predicts. “Why? Because, for marketers, it’s all about response.”
