The United States Postal Service just whipped out something surprisingly innovative. As I was using their online address change service, which costs only a buck (for “ID authentication”…I wonder how much they bank on this), I got a few screens in and after gave my old address, new address and email, I was asked a rather interesting question:

“Which of these catalogs do you subscribe to? Most catalogs are not forwarded, but if you tell us which ones you subscribe to, we can make sure that they are sent.”

The list (with thumbnail images) had two check boxes next to each title. One was “already receive” and the other was “would like to receive”. I thought it was interesting that they were (a little sneakily) monetizing the traffic that was there to change their mailing address by certainly getting a kick back on catalog sign ups.

(Basically, the way that Co-Registration works - your contact information is passed to a 3rd party when you opt-in to other offers during a sign up or registration. The 3rd party pays a CPL (cost per lead) amount to the site that you were originally using)

As I proceeded to the confirmation screen, the co-registration/ 3rd party offers got pretty blatant, even pushing a sense of urgency with the “Available this visit only” copy. I just had to take a screen shot:

I’ve seen the USPS try all kinds of things to compete with other, private delivery services like DHL, UPS and Fedex (which has an arrow in it’s logo in case you didn’t notice), but this one really intrigues me. I’m going to have to dig on these guys a bit more…