Intelligent Mail Barcodes – Great Benefits for Marketers

It’s been years in the making with numerous deadline delays to fully integrate the Intelligent Mail Barcode (IMB) from the USPS. The IMB, which is replacing the POSTNET barcode, is already a great benefit for marketers using it. If you haven’t adopted the new IMB, now is the time. Here are a few reasons why…

First, as a marketer, it provides you with more tracking insight to better understand where your direct mail campaigns are in the mail stream so that you can more accurately report in-home timing updates to your internal and executive teams. This also allows you to more accurately gauge response timing so your call centers and inbound sales staff can be prepared.

Second, through integrated platforms that marketing service providers offer, you can integrate trigger-based marketing touches from the IMB scan – making your marketing touches more timely and effective. For example, you send out a direct mail letter package to a prospect and have a follow-up email that you plan to deploy after the direct mail is in-home. Historically, you weren’t able to accurately set a deployment date for the follow-up email, rather, you just had to cross your fingers and deploy, hoping that the mail arrived in your prospects mailbox in a timely fashion.

But with the integrated IMB approach, you can now set triggered emails from the IMB scan for your desired timing. So now, after the first direct mail piece’s IMB is scanned, the timed email trigger can be set precisely for when you want it to deploy. This makes for a much more relevant and timely experience for the recipient that allows that email to truly be a reminder that the direct mail has arrived.

And it’s important to note that integrated IMB campaign solutions aren’t expensive. They’re low-cost options that marketing organizations of all sizes can afford.

So moving forward, remember that the IMB does more than just help the USPS…it can help you improve your direct marketing campaign performance as well.

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