During last year’s National Postal Forum, Postmaster General and Chief Executive Officer of the Postal Service, Megan Brennan, announced a coming-soon digital mail program called “Real Mail Notification,” according to a press release byUSPS. There has been a recent update that this service will go nationwide in 2017 and is currently a 67,000-person beta test in New York and Virginia.

According to the press release, Brennan states, “We’re building this platform to bring physical content onto the same screen as the user’s digital content… The potential is enormous for this industry – because it will create a daily bridge from your mailed content to your digital ecosystem.” USPS intends to emerge as a digital player in a digital world with this new digital mail program. The notification will provide people images of the fronts of the envelopes they will receive in their home mailboxes that day. For now, this photo notification is limited to only letter mail, which is photographed in the sorting process.

The real mail notification service means marketers can further intertwine digital and direct mail channels in campaigns and programs because, in addition to technologies that already allow consumers to use mail to launch websites, they will be seeing what is arriving in real time on their mobile devices. According to PostalNews.com, 9 out of 10 consumers participating in the Virginia beta test are checking their mobile devices daily for real mail notifications.