It's holiday season and consumers everywhere are stressing out about all the cards they have to send out and shipping gifts on time. Understanding the stress of the holiday season, the U.S. Postal Service created a fun, festive, and useful site to help consumers with their holiday mailing needs. This one-stop-shop has a lot of helpful features including tutorials for printing labels and scheduling pickup, custom card creator, locator for finding post offices with extended hours, and holiday countdowns for Hanukkah, Christmas, and Kwanza.
The site is effective because it provides value to consumers by making their lives easier and keeps them engaged with the Web site and the brand. The experience of using the site is great way to keep consumers coming back to USPS for their shipping needs instead of using other providers.
All-in-all it's a good site and next year's site could be even better by adding:
- Sharing: Make the site more shareable and increase word of mouth by adding functionality for sharing on Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, etc.
- Augmented Reality: USPS has a cool and innovative Virtual Box Simulator. It is a perfect fit for the holiday site and should be a featured tool.
- Branded App: An app that incorporates site features such as scheduling a delivery, countdown calendars, and post office locator as well as new features such as reminders and a to-do list would make for a very relevant and useful app.
--Marina Molenda
