Important Changes Proposed for Informed Delivery and Promotion
April 25, 2019   Dave Lewis

As day follows night and the sun rises in the east, the Postal Service makes things more complicated.  Hot off the press, a draft proposal makes some important changes to Informed Delivery requirements.  These are just proposed at this point, but it is a pretty safe bet that some version of these rules will become part of the program going forward. A lot of the rules surrounding the promotion are the usual bureaucratic nonsense – you’ll need to keep a copy of your mail piece until September 30, 2020; you’ll need to provide a lot of PDF’s pre-mailing, that kind of stuff.  Annoying, but oh-so-postal. The big changes revolve around restrictions on the Representative Image and the Ride-along image.  The Representative Image, if used, must “closely resemble the outer envelope or exposed panel of the physical mail-piece.”  So no more designing a different image – it is essentially a color picture of the mail-piece.  Of course this is vague wording, and vague wording is like a vacuum in Postal regulations – it will be filled by lots more words.  Expect a lot of very specific rules to come out of this.  Still, we think this is a good idea in principle – it prevents the ID email from being cluttered with what could be, essentially, banner ads. On the Ride-along Image, well, that’s another story.  As currently proposed, the Call-To-Action in the Ride-along “cannot encourage elimination of mail (e.g., “Click here to pay online”)”.  Sheesh.  Linking mail to an online payment or donation site is kind of the point of trying to link mail to the online world.  By extension, of course, this would not allow “Donate Now” buttons.  I’m not sure what other call-to-action a fundraiser could use. Anyhoo, this is all a proposal for now but we want our users to be aware so they can think in terms of designing their ID campaigns appropriately.  We expect, um, vigorous discussion on this before it becomes the official rule.  We’re also not sure how much will stay on as ID regulations after the promotion is over. We promise to keep you Informed. In the meantime, if you’d like to read the proposed draft, click here.

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