New United States Postal Service put into effect their latest rate increase starting Sunday, July 14, 2024. Unlike the adjustment in January of 2024, this July increase includes significant price hikes for Market-Dominant Mail.
In this article, we’ll look at the new rates and examine seven tactics to control spend and improve results for direct mail campaigns, improving overall return on ad spend.
July 14, 2024 marketing mail prices
Market-Dominant rates increased an average of 7.8%, with variations across individual mail classifications. This table contains the rates most relevant to direct mailers.
| Classification | Average Increase % |
| Marketing Mail | |
| Automation Letters | 7.5% |
| Non-profit Letters | 3.2% |
| Carrier Route Letters (NDC/SCF levels) | 7.7% |
| Automation Flat Pieces | 9.0% |
| Non-profit Flats | 15.3% |
| First-Class Mail | |
| Automation Letters | 7.6% |
| First-Class Postcards | 7.4% |
One bright spot for mailers using Intelligent Mail barcode Accounting (IMbA) for their Qualified Business Reply Mail (QBRM) is the Postal Service has lowered the per-piece fee as well as waived the quarterly and annual account maintenance fees.
The unshakable appeal of direct mail
Even in the face of painful twice-a-year postage increases, marketers remain strongly committed to the channel. In fact, 81% of marketers using direct mail plan on increasing their direct mail budgets in the next 6 to 12 months.[1]
What’s behind this staunch investment in direct mail?
To start, direct mail is hardly the only channel facing cost increases. Digital advertising costs have seen steep rises without corresponding improved results. Evolving data privacy laws, the disappearing cookie, and app tracking transparency initiatives further erode digital advertising’s reach and effectiveness. So much so, we have seen a growing list of etail brands entering the direct mail channel to much success.
And, when we look at key marketing KPIs, we see that for many marketers direct mail is their top performing channel.
No wonder then that direct mail is a fixture in today’s marketing mix.
Proactively optimize your direct mail
Direct mail is the workhorse of omnichannel marketing, but to get the most out of it you must optimize every aspect from conception through execution and tracking.
Here are 7 tactics every marketer can deploy to do just that.
1. Database Cleansing
Sending undeliverable mail wastes critical budget dollars. More than 40 million Americans annually notify the USPS of an address change. Rid your mailing lists of incorrect or outdated information by checking it against the USPS National Change of Address (NCOA) database.
Cleansing databases ensures the right person receives your offers. And don’t forget to remove duplicate records!
2. Get to Know Your Customers
Think you know your customers? Do you understand why they buy form you? By overlaying available 3rd-party household-level data points onto your customer database, data scientists can analyze and identify the most important attributes that define who your customers are. Expert cluster analysis groups your customers into cohorts that share key data points, yielding for you unique custom personas.
Key to this is finding a partner with unfettered access to thousands of constantly refreshed, multi-sourced household-level targeting data. Otherwise, you’re wasting time and money dealing with middlemen. An in-house data stack speeds time to market by eliminating the constant back/forth of data requests, allowing for at-will data modeling.
3. Identify Your Optimal Audience
In addition to understanding who your customers are, you’ll also learn who they are not. That same data can be further evaluated and modeled to create an ideal customer profile. That ideal profile is used to search the data stack where data-driven response models and lookalike modeling identifies new prospects deemed most likely to respond to your offers.
Armed with these new insights, your creative team has the specifics to guide the ideation process, and better inform the messaging, imagery, and offers of your direct mail campaigns for true 1:1 marketing.
In the end you’ll save money by not targeting and mailing non-responders, while increasing sales to ideal prospects.
4. Use Every Available Incentive
In addition to the always-on postage discounts concerning the addressing and physical formatting of mail pieces (see Tip 7), the USPS runs numerous promotions and incentives throughout the year that provide meaningful postage discounts and credits.
Especially useful are the promotions that increase response rates and tracking, such as the annual Emerging and Advanced Technology, Informed Delivery, and Retargeting programs.
In most cases, these discounts deliver net savings even in situations where qualifying for a particular promotion involves additional production costs.
Previously we detailed the 2024 postal promotions and incentives to reduce postage bills well into 2025.
5. Track and Measure Results
Measure (at least) twice, cut once, is great advice for more than construction. An expansive customer response knowledge center, or dashboard, delivers insights into what’s driving your lowest cost-to-acquire and the highest incremental return on ad spend for ongoing campaign refinement.
The right combination of dashboard analytics—sorted in nearly limitless combinations—illuminate previously unknown hot spots of success, and strategies to perhaps avoid or modify. Are new movers a signal of intent to open a new business? Should you invest more, or less, in reaching homemakers who drive domestic car brands? Is targeting college graduates who prefer wine over beer a losing strategy?
Best of all, you’ll be able to state with certainty direct mail’s contribution to overall omnichannel campaign results.
6. Start Retargeting
Monitor website activity or incorporate personalized QR codes and URLs in your mailers to track consumer intent, then send a second touch to top intenders when they are in market and ready act.
2024 research data[2] reveals that among consumers who recently purchased a physical product, applied for an insurance or financial product, or made travel-related reservations, majorities did so because they were already looking into the product or service and a mail piece encouraged them to purchase.
7. Automate and Consolidate
The Postal Service offers multiple postage discounts that are available every time you mail.
- Machinable letter and card discounts apply to cards and letter-rate mail that moves through the USPS’s equipment efficiently.
- Automation discounts apply to properly barcoded and pre-sorted mail.
- Volume discounts apply when a greater density of mail volume is delivered as close as possible to the final destination.
There are different reasons some mailers fail to take advantage of some or all these savings opportunities, but the most common revolve around:
- Mail that does not / cannot meet qualifications
- A lack of understanding/assistance in meeting qualifications.
It’s true; Some mail pieces simply cannot meet certain Postal regulations.
But, working with a mail provider who has expertise in every aspect of Postal Service regulations, and a robust manufacturing footprint yields:
- Innovative suggestions on redesigning certain package types to meet some or all machinable/automation discounts
- Access to solutions like commingling and add-a-name to meet volume requirements
- Constant communications promoting opportunities to minimize your postage spend
Here to Help
SG360° is ready to help you master any or all of these campaign optimization steps. To get the ball rolling, fill out the form below.
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[1] SG360° (2024) The Future of Direct Mail 2024, SG360°
[2] Ibid.
