It’s no government secret that the U.S. Postal Service is facing stiffer competition than ever from the big express-delivery companies on all fronts, and in particular in the scramble for the small business customer. Consolidations and synergies among the big private shippers—in particular the merger that put FedEx and Kinko’s into 1,100 combined locations around the country in the spring of 2004—have mad the USPS realize that it can no longer rely on its reputation among small retailers and small office/ home office (SOHO) users as the low-cost option.
For that reason, the USPS last May launched an integrated direct marketing campaign to promote the convenience and reliability of its online Click-N-Ship service to small businesses. Laurie Nations, a senior vice president at agency Draft Chicago and group account director for the USPS account, recently sat with DirectTips to give some detail on how the campaign was strategized and executed, and the results it achieved—including some of the best responses in postal history.
The campaign began with a first wave of small-business mailings in May 2004, offering a Priority Mail starter kit: a box containing envelopes, boxes and labels, and a step-by-step guide containing shipping information and rates. The most important piece in this kit was a Click-N-Ship tutorial CD-ROM that explains how to use the USPS’s carrier pickup service.
Click-N-Ship, launched in 2003, lets users step out of the post office line and make online arrangements for next-day package pickup at their home or office. The CD-ROM in the starter kit not only laid out the procedure for setting pickup but, with the user’s permission, downloaded a desktop Click-N-Ship icon, to make sure users were one click away from the service in the future.
That first wave of mailings sent out about 40,000 pieces and received a healthy 4.5% response rate, according to Nations. A second mailing in August 2004 offered essentially the same materials to another 87,000 small business customers and got about the same response.
But Draft and the USPS realized that while it was useful to provide potential customers with the supplies needed to ship, the address for setting up shipment, and a way to buy postage online, one important element was missing: the machinery to let them know how much a package would cost to ship. Quite simply, some small businesses and SOHOs do not own postal scales.
So the third direct-mail wave in the Priority Mail campaign bridged that gap by including a set of functioning “Stack and Weigh” scales in the starter kit. Developed by a Dutch inventor, these scales are a nested set of three bridge-shaped forms, about eight inches long and made of red, white and blue plastic. Thin metal inserts in the legs give each bridge a different rigidity, and they’re marked for 1-, 2- or 3-pound weights. A user simply puts one of these—say, the 1-pound bridge-- on a tabletop and lays the package on it. If the package flattens the scale enough to touch the table, it’s heavier than one pound, so the user goes on to try the 2-pound version. By stacking the scales, customers can weigh packages of up to about 6 pounds, which Nations says is a good cut-off for home businesses or small retailers.
“Postal scales are large, cumbersome, and not everyone in the target group has them,” she says. “We thought this would be a clever way to add something immediately useful to the consumer while drawing attention to the promotion.”
And results show that Draft Chicago was right. As good as response rates were for the first two mail waves, the third one with the stacking scales premium—which went out to 144,000 small business/SOHO recipients-- surpassed those results: a 6% response rate, the best in the history of USPS mail campaigns, according to Nations.
The only question is whether those response rates were hiked by the premium alone, or whether they got a boost from a simultaneous September 2004 e-mail campaign promoting the online carrier pickup service for small business. The e-mails also offered respondents a free set of the Stack and Weigh scales for their first use of the pickup service.
“That campaign got a phenomenal response,” Nations says. “We got a 9% unique click-through rate, and 49% of those folks converted.”
E-mail campaigns such as that require a leap of faith on the part of the USPS, she says. “After all, they are in the hard-copy delivery business, and electronic communications is really hurting first-class mail, with things like online bill presentment and payment. It’s a case of ‘Video killed the radio star.’”
But the target group the USPS wanted to reach—small businesses/ SOHOs—is predominantly online, and the Postal Service has had to overcome that competitive resistance to the Web. “The customers are online, the carrier pickup service is requested online, and therefore it made sense to promote it online via e-mail,” Nations says. “There are some people [at the USPS] who still don’t like the idea, because electronic media are displacing traditional mail service. But the marketing department recognizes that you have to serve customers the way they want to be served, and Web services are very big with small business. So they made the leap, and judging by the results, I think they’re happy they did.”
