How to Launch an Informed Delivery Campaign in 5 Steps

Every morning, roughly 65 million Americans get an email from USPS showing scanned previews of the mail arriving at their address that day. The program is called Informed Delivery, and for direct mail senders it’s the cheapest extra impression available — a free preview email reaching engaged recipients at one of the highest open rates in any consumer channel. Most senders don’t take advantage of it. The five steps below are the launch playbook.

What Informed Delivery actually does

USPS scans the front of every piece of letter-class mail in sortation. For mail addressed to households enrolled in Informed Delivery (about 65M households as of 2025), the scan image flows to a daily email preview the morning of expected delivery. The recipient sees what’s coming before they walk to the mailbox.

For senders, this means every piece of mail produces two impressions: the email preview and the physical piece. That’s the floor. The ceiling is what the campaign adds on top — a “ride-along” image and a click-through URL that show up in the email alongside the scan.

Step 1: Enroll as a USPS mailer

You need a USPS Business Customer Gateway account and an Informed Delivery campaign user role. Setup takes 10–15 minutes. The account links to your mailing permit and surfaces the campaign-builder interface inside the Gateway.

Most platforms (DirectMail.io included) handle this automatically when a campaign is set to ID-enabled. The mailer doesn’t need to navigate the Gateway directly.

Step 2: Design the ride-along creative

The ride-along is a 300×200 pixel image that displays alongside the mail scan in the email. It can include a CTA, an offer, or a brand mark. The image links to a URL of the sender’s choice.

Three rules for ride-along creative:

• Don’t repeat the mail piece. The scan is already showing the piece. Use the ride-along to extend the offer with something the scan can’t show — a video, a landing page, an offer code.
• Prioritize the brand mark. The scan in B&W loses brand color. The ride-along is the place to assert the brand identity in full color.
• Keep the CTA short. “See more,” “Get $25 off,” “Watch the video.” Long CTAs at 300×200 don’t render legibly on mobile.

Step 3: Set the URL and tracking

The ride-along’s click target should be a URL that’s specific to the campaign — not the homepage. A unique campaign URL with UTM tags lets the dashboard track Informed Delivery clicks separately from other channel sources. Click-through rate on ride-alongs averages around 26.8% — meaningful traffic for any campaign.

If the platform supports it, the URL can also be PURL-style — recipient-specific. Most ID-enabled platforms support this; if yours doesn’t, the URL is at least campaign-level.

Step 4: Match the ride-along to the mail’s drop window

The Informed Delivery campaign needs to be active during the same window the mail is in sortation. Campaigns set up after the mail has dropped won’t backfill — recipients see the scan without the ride-along. The setup needs to be done at the same time the mail file is approved.

Most platforms automate this; manual setups risk a window mismatch.

Step 5: Read the dashboard

USPS provides reporting on every Informed Delivery campaign:

• Email opens: How many recipients saw the preview
• Ride-along impressions: How many saw the ride-along (subset of opens)
• Ride-along clicks: Click-throughs to the URL

A typical campaign sees 60–65% open rate, 30–40% ride-along impression rate (some users have ride-along disabled), 25–30% click-through on impressions.

These numbers compound on top of physical-mail response. A direct mail campaign that runs 4.5% physical response with Informed Delivery enabled often shows a 6–7% combined response (mail action + ride-along click). Same drop, more attribution.

Why this isn’t standard practice yet

Three structural reasons most senders skip Informed Delivery:

• The setup feels marginal. The 10-minute setup per campaign reads as “low priority” until the dashboard shows the open rate.
• Creative teams don’t include ride-along in the brief. The mail piece gets designed; the ride-along gets forgotten until 48 hours before drop.
• Older platforms don’t automate it. If the platform doesn’t propagate the mail-file metadata into the ID campaign, every campaign needs manual setup, and the friction kills it.

Senders running Informed Delivery as a default — every campaign, every drop — capture the impressions automatically. Senders running it ad hoc usually skip it on most campaigns.

What ride-along creative shouldn’t do

Three failure modes:

• A photo of the same mail piece. Redundant with the scan. Wastes the ride-along slot.
• A generic brand banner. Doesn’t drive action. Wastes the impression.
• A mismatched offer. Ride-along says “20% off” while mail says “free shipping.” Recipient gets confused, ignores both.

The ride-along should reinforce or extend the mail’s offer, not contradict or duplicate it.

What about non-enrolled households?

Roughly half of US households aren’t enrolled in Informed Delivery. They get the physical mail piece without the email preview. The campaign’s response on this segment is whatever the mail piece produces on its own.

This isn’t a downside — it’s the floor. The Informed Delivery enrollees deliver the upside. The marginal cost of running a ride-along is essentially zero (a 300×200 image and a 10-minute setup), so the campaign captures the upside without sacrificing anything on the rest of the list.

Running this on DirectMail.io

The platform automates the Informed Delivery campaign creation as a default option on every drop. Mail file metadata propagates to the ID campaign automatically; ride-along creative uploads alongside the mail art file; URL tracking is wired to the dashboard. See Features for the integration.

For agencies running this for clients, the per-client ride-along library lives in the Agencies workspace — set the brand presets once, every campaign inherits them.

The math, last time

A 50,000-piece drop with Informed Delivery enabled produces roughly:

• 50,000 physical impressions
• ~30,000 ID email opens
• ~10,000 ride-along clicks

Total impressions: 90,000 on a campaign that cost the same as a 50,000-piece mail-only drop. The 80% lift on impressions costs the time it took to upload a 300×200 image.

This is the easiest direct mail upgrade in the industry. The senders not doing it are leaving impressions on the table for free.