Your mail arrives twice. Once in their inbox, once in their mailbox.
USPS emails Informed Delivery subscribers a preview of the mail coming that day — 80.8 million people use it. With a campaign, that preview carries your full-color creative and a clickable link, riding along with mail you're already sending, at no media cost.
Landed here from a mail preview or a printed piece? Start here — that's the service you were looking at, and we're the printer behind it.
What Informed Delivery Actually Does
Informed Delivery is a free USPS service for consumers and businesses. Subscribers get an email previewing the mail arriving that day — before it lands. And people actually open it: USPS reports an open rate above 60%, across 80.8 million active users.
Left alone, your piece appears in that email as USPS imaged it — no brand, no message, no way to act on it. That's a wasted impression. An Informed Delivery campaign fixes it.
When you run a campaign, you supply two things that travel with your mailing:
- A ride-along image — full-color creative shown with your mailpiece, so the preview carries your brand
- A target URL — a clickable link to your landing page, offer, form, or phone number
- Seen ahead of the mailbox — the recipient can act on the offer while the piece is still in transit
- No media cost — USPS does not charge for the campaign; the impression rides along with mail you're already paying to send
A second impression on a mailing you've already paid for.
Most channels make you buy every impression. This one you've already bought. The postage is spent the moment you decide to mail — the campaign simply keeps that spend from stopping at the mailbox.
It also narrows direct mail's oldest gap — the one between drop and response. The recipient sees your creative and can click through while they're thinking about it, so the printed piece arrives as the reminder rather than the introduction.
See our direct mail services →USPS May Also Discount Your Postage
Beyond the free impression, USPS offers an Informed Delivery promotion — a postage discount for qualifying mailings that include a campaign. For a mailing of any real size, that is money worth checking on before you set a drop date.
We're not going to print a percentage here. USPS sets the promotion terms and revises them from year to year, and a figure hardcoded into a web page is a figure that goes stale without anyone noticing. You'd be quoted a number we can't stand behind.
What we'll do instead: check the promotion terms in force for your drop date, tell you straight whether your mailing qualifies, and factor the answer into your quote — before you commit to anything.
- We check the current promotion terms against what USPS has published
- We tell you up front whether your mailing qualifies, including when it doesn't
- We work the discount into your quote rather than leaving you to claim it
- Postage is a passthrough — you pay the USPS rate, never a markup
We Run the Campaign, Not You
Running a campaign means getting the creative to USPS and keeping it tied to the mailing it belongs to. Most mail owners can't practically do that themselves — which is why the opportunity so often goes unused. As your Mail Service Provider, we handle it on your behalf.
Build the creative
You send us a ride-along image and the URL you want it to point to — or our in-house design team builds the artwork to USPS specification alongside the printed piece, so both tell the same story.
Submit the campaign
We submit the campaign to USPS under our own mailer credentials and tie it to your mailing, so the right creative goes with the right pieces on the right day.
Monitor it live
We watch the campaign while it runs and confirm it's actually serving against your mail. If something is off, we find it while the mailing is still in the stream — not weeks later.
Export the results
When the campaign closes we pull the USPS campaign data and hand it to you, so the digital half of the mailing gets measured instead of assumed.
Print, Mail, and Campaign — One Roof
An Informed Delivery campaign has to line up with the mailing it rides on. When the printer, the mail house, and the campaign submitter are three different companies, that coordination is your problem. Here it isn't.
We print your piece, prepare and enter the mail through our in-house USPS operation, and submit the campaign against that same mailing. One project manager, one timeline, one point of contact.
- Commercial printing and in-house design at our Pflugerville plant
- A USPS Seamless Acceptance facility — mail enters the postal stream as it leaves our floor
- Full-service mail preparation and in-house USPS entry
- Informed Delivery campaign submission, monitoring, and reporting
- Variable data printing for personalized campaigns
- Serving Austin, Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio, and mailing nationwide
What We Need From You
Three things. If you're missing any of them, we can build them with you — that's a conversation, not a blocker.
A Ride-Along Image
The full-color creative shown in the recipient's mail preview. It has to meet USPS's size and format specification — we'll send you the spec, or design it for you alongside the printed piece.
A Destination URL
Where the click should go. A landing page, an offer, a booking form, a phone number. Pick something that matches the printed piece so the two halves of the campaign don't contradict each other.
The Mailing Itself
The campaign rides along with mail you're sending anyway. Tell us the quantity, the audience, and roughly when you want it to land, and we'll quote the print, the mail, and the campaign together.
Frequently Asked
What is USPS Informed Delivery?
Informed Delivery is a free U.S. Postal Service feature that emails consumers and businesses a daily preview of the mail arriving that day, so recipients see what's coming before it reaches the mailbox. USPS reports 80.8 million active users.
What does an Informed Delivery campaign add to that?
By default the preview simply shows your mailpiece as USPS imaged it. When you run a campaign, you supply two things to go with it: a full-color ride-along image, and a target URL. The recipient sees your creative in the preview and can click straight through to your landing page, offer, or appointment form.
What does an Informed Delivery campaign cost?
USPS does not charge for the campaign itself — there is no media cost and no cost-per-impression. The digital impression rides along with mail you are already sending. What you'll want quoted is the print, the mail, and our handling of the campaign. Ask your account manager for pricing on your specific mailing.
Is there a postage discount for running one?
Yes. USPS offers an Informed Delivery promotion that provides a postage discount on qualifying mailings that include a campaign. The terms are set by USPS and are revised from year to year, so we deliberately don't publish a figure here. Contact us and we'll confirm the current terms and whether your mailing qualifies before you commit to a drop date.
Do I have to set up the campaign myself?
No — and most mail owners can't practically do it themselves, which is why the opportunity so often goes unused. As your Mail Service Provider, CIP submits the campaign on your behalf, monitors it while it runs, and exports the results when it closes.
What do you need from me to run a campaign?
A ride-along image sized to USPS specification, the destination URL you want it to link to, and the mailing itself. If you don't have artwork, our in-house design team can build it. We handle the rest — the specs, the submission, and the monitoring.
Does this work with EDDM and saturation mail?
Tell us what you're mailing and we'll tell you plainly whether a campaign can ride along with it. Whether a given mailing qualifies depends on how it's prepared, and that's a question we answer against your actual job rather than in general terms — so ask us before you assume either way. We run EDDM, saturation, and targeted mail every week, so the answer comes fast.
I received mail from you — why am I on this page?
You most likely saw our address on a mailpiece or in your Informed Delivery preview. Community Impact Printing is a commercial printer and USPS Mail Service Provider in Pflugerville, Texas. We print and mail on behalf of our customers, so the offer you received came from one of them rather than from us. If you'd like to talk about mailing something yourself, we'd welcome that. If you'd rather not receive mail, you can submit a data privacy request and we'll process it.
How do I get started?
Call (512) 989-6804, email cipsales@communityimpact.com, or send us a quote request. Tell us roughly how many pieces you're mailing and when you want them to land, and we'll come back within one business day with a plan for the print, the mail, and the campaign together.
Let's make your next mailing land twice.
Tell us what you're mailing and when. We'll come back within one business day with a plan for the print, the mail, and the Informed Delivery campaign together — and confirm whether the current USPS postage discount applies.