Intelligent Mail Barcode Tracking Keeps Your Campaigns in Check

You’ve designed a direct mail piece, punched up with pictures of sunflowers, to promote the sale at your locations in Lexington, Louisville and Cincinnati. It was mailed from Lexington. But when sale day arrives, customers are sparse and sales are small at the Cincinnati shop. You feel as droopy as a plant in a dried-out flowerpot. What happened, you wonder? Is gardening passé? Are sunflowers a turnoff? Or, did your direct mail piece fail to arrive in time?

Thanks to intelligent mail barcodes (IMBs), you can find the answer to your last question. IMBs are unique barcodes printed on individual pieces of mail that act as tracking devices to allow you to follow the path of mailed pieces. Here’s how they work:

1. Unique IMBs are printed on each of your sales fliers and scanned by the U.S. Postal Service.
2. Using those IMBs and information stored within the postal system, your direct mail can be tracked. You can find out when your fliers reached the post office in Cincinnati. (After your mail reaches the post office, it takes one to two days for it to be delivered by a carrier.)
3. If the report you receive shows that your direct mail took longer than expected to arrive in Cincinnati, you will want to evaluate your timeline and mail your future direct mail sooner. Or, you might want to drop your mail at a different post office, even have it mailed in Cincinnati instead of from Lexington. You can also use the data to question the postal service’s process.