USPS Informed Delivery for Business: The Transactional Sender’s Guide

Two different things share the name “Informed Delivery,” and mixing them up costs you time. The consumer feature lets any household preview incoming mail as grayscale scans in a daily email. The business program lets you attach full-color creative to those scans and pull engagement data back. This guide covers the business side: how to run Informed Delivery on your statement and notice streams so every piece works harder before it hits the mailbox.

If you landed here to preview your own mail, head to the consumer feature at usps.com. If you’re sending statements, invoices, or regulated notices at volume and want a second digital touchpoint from mail you already send, keep reading.

A quick note on terminology: we use “transactional mail” and “statement mail” interchangeably here. Both mean mail that fulfills an obligation (a bill, an invoice, a regulatory notice) rather than mail sent purely to market or prospect.

The payoff is simple: a second touchpoint at no extra postage. When a statement enters the mail stream, the recipient sees a preview in their Daily Digest email the morning it arrives. That preview reaches people who actually open their mail. Per the USPS Informed Delivery Year in Review (April 2024 to March 2025), the feature had 72.9 million active users and a Daily Digest open rate of 58.6%, well ahead of the 35.63% all-industry average that Mailchimp reports.

For billers, three things change. Recipients know the statement is coming, so it doesn’t get lost in a pile. Payment intent rises because the ride-along creative can link straight to a pay-now page. And disputes drop because the customer recognizes the piece before it lands. The mail you have to send starts doing the work of the mail you want to send.

This layer sits on top of your existing statement production, so we won’t re-teach that pipeline here. For how statements get composed, printed, and inducted, see our statement printing and mailing services.

Preview accuracy is the real challenge with transactional mail. The scanned grayscale image your recipient sees has to represent the actual piece. For a marketing postcard, that’s easy because every piece looks the same. For a variable statement built with variable data printing, every piece is different, and the automated scan can expose content you’d rather keep out of an inbox preview.

USPS gives you two supplemental image types to solve this. Understanding both is the key to a clean campaign.

Here’s the rule: if the grayscale scan of a statement would show account details, balances, or anything you don’t want previewed, supply a Representative image so a clean, brand-safe graphic shows up instead. When the piece is a generic envelope with no exposed data, the scan alone is usually fine. Think of the Representative image as a compliance and clarity tool, not just a design upgrade. USPS documents both image types in its Informed Delivery campaign image requirements.

Running Informed Delivery on a statement stream comes down to six steps. Use this as your build checklist.

USPS details the field-level requirements in its Informed Delivery interactive campaign guide.

Treat the preview as public. The Daily Digest and dashboard are digital surfaces, so anything visible there needs to meet the same privacy bar as a window envelope, not the bar of the sealed contents inside.

Two things matter most for regulated senders:

When a notice carries legal or regulatory weight, route the ride-along creative and preview treatment past the same reviewers who approve the printed piece. The preview is part of the communication now, so treat it that way.

No. The consumer feature lets households preview incoming mail. The business program lets you attach full-color creative to those previews and collect engagement data. This guide is about the business program for transactional mail.

No. The campaign layer rides along on mail you’re already sending, so you get a second touchpoint at no added postage. You invest in creative and setup, not additional postage per piece.

No. You need one whenever the grayscale scan would expose account data or sensitive detail. For plain envelopes with nothing revealing in the scan, the standard grayscale image is usually acceptable.

Yes. A full-service direct mail partner can initiate and analyze campaigns on your behalf using the MID and IMb serial range on the piece. Whoever submits the campaign gets access to its data and reports.

Informed Delivery turns a statement you already send into a measured digital touchpoint, but only when the preview accuracy, image handling, and IMb mapping are right on every piece. That precision is where most programs stall, and it’s where a partner that handles print, data processing, and USPS induction under one roof earns its keep.

We run Informed Delivery ride-along campaigns directly on statement and notice streams, so the grayscale scan, the Representative image, and the serial range all line up with no extra vendors in the loop. Talk to the Mailing.com team about adding Informed Delivery to your statement program.