Part 2: Decoding the Intelligent Mail Barcode

Experts discuss the creative implications of the Intelligent Mail Barcode and the benefits it affords

In part one of this feature, published last month, postal experts reflected on the rules and challenges marketers face when implementing the U.S. Postal Service's new Intelligent Mail Barcode (IMB) system. From that discussion, experts agreed that full service was a more attractive option than basic service and implementing IMB before the May 2011 deadline could take anywhere from a couple of months to two years, depending on your organization's existing IT infrastructure.

Looking past all of the requirements and technicalities, the creative benefits of Intelligent Mail are great, promising to improve tracking, measurability, list hygiene and cross-channel marketing. Here's a peek into some of the best practices and approaches the mail industry is taking.

Make Mail More Malleable
With full-service IMBs, each piece of mail will have an electronic trail of information tracking it from the mail preparer to the delivery point. Many mailers and mail suppliers have been preemptively leveraging data using the POSTNET barcode and costly USPS Confirm Service to track their mailings and analyze campaign data. However, full-service IMBs are an improvement over this method because they are universal and house data about the mail owner, mail piece, recipient and delivery through the postal system.

IM's digital reporting capability gets even more exciting when marketers sync up this data with customer relationship management, e-mail and other automated systems. "With the visibility in the mail, you can tie campaigns together to understand when to either precede or follow up with e-mail, or when to time release of TV, radio or newspaper advertisements," describes Thomas Day, senior vice president of Intelligent Mail and address quality for the USPS.

For those with fulfillment processes tied to the back end of a campaign, he says the ability to anticipate high order volumes and staff fulfillment centers accordingly greatly improves campaign performance.

Reporting at an individual piece level arms vendors with more information to then provide clients with predictive analysis. "We can extrapolate the predicted results based on complete delivery, so you can get up-to-the-minute analysis of where you are and where we expect you should be after all the pieces get through," details Rio Longacre, co-founder and VP of operations with Indros Group, a software developer and reseller based in Brooklyn.

Research Available Software Solutions
The move from a paper-based to a digital environment is what Day calls the most critical and technically complex aspect of full-service IM. When the USPS was developing its systems, it was difficult to honor all of the requests and suggestions made by participating mailers. As a result, some USPS customers will have to modify their own systems to meet the specifications of the IM acceptance and reporting schemes.  "We've got to build the system, be able to process the data and then provision the data back to those customers-and you can only accommodate so much variation," Day notes.