If you’re a marketer looking for an easy, free way to add digital elements to your direct mail campaign, then yes, you should be using the Informed Delivery program.

The U.S. Postal Service launched this e-mail-based service to provide people with a daily e-mail digest of the mail that gets delivered to their home each day. The digest contains up to 10 scanned images of the address side of letter-class mail. In addition to the convenience that Informed Delivery provides its subscribers, the program is a boon for direct marketers because it offers a free additional customer touch point.

With Informed Delivery, marketers have the option to add digital elements to the scanned image that appears in the daily email digests. These digital elements include a target url and a custom supplemental image.

Currently, 95% of Informed Delivery users open their daily digest every day or almost every day. Users now include 10.4 million households and 7.7 million email accounts. The USPS reports that 96% of users would recommend Informed Delivery to friends or colleagues.

Informed Delivery is now available in almost all U.S. zip codes. The daily emails include images of letters and postcards, as well as some flats. In cases where mailers elect to conduct a digital campaign, they can substitute a custom image for a flat image that does not get scanned.

The genesis of the program goes back to the early 2000s. After a series of anthrax attacks were made through the mail after 9-11, the USPS began scanning all mail as a security precaution. Scanning gives the USPS and direct marketers a way to integrate their mailings with the digital world in way that was not possible previously.

You can visit here to register for your Informed Delivery email digest.