Thought-leadership research for content marketing strengthens a brand’s credibility, generates awareness, increases engagement, and build new leads.

Marketing Problem

e-Commerce companies often have difficulty with return management and reverse logistics. Issues include fragmentation, siloed functions, and some companies even have no return operation policies in place. These problems often cause issues such as redundancies in costs and efforts.

The United States Postal Service was looking to help businesses deal with the accelerating realities of the online purchase returns landscape. Therefore, to provide the most pertinent information, the government agency wanted to understand: 

• How do retailers structure and communicate their e-Commerce return policy? 
• What types of logistics solutions are in place to set them up for success with returns?
• Create a competitive benchmark to help companies understand that their returns policy is up to par. 

So, the government agency on-boarded Provoke Insights in order to create thought-leadership research by conducting quantitative research to help companies understand if their returns policy is up to par. Thus, the aim of the research was to provide original content on this topic for USPS to generate engagement on the USPSDelivers blog for logistics and operation professionals. 

Market Research Solution

Provoke Insights conducted an online survey among 300 professionals involved in the reverse logistics process. With that in mind, the survey was designed to gather content marketing insights on the following topics: 

• How companies self-assess their returns policy;
• Barriers, challenges, and concerns that companies have when it comes to returns;
• Solutions and tactics in improving efficiencies during the reverse logistics process.

Results of the Research

USPS was able to use the research for content marketing and thought leadership purposes. They published a report on the USPSDelivers blog – read the report here. The B2B target audience can use the results to understand how to improve the reverse logistics process.

The market research firm found that implementing new technologies is an essential way to help the reverse logistics process and that a tenth of companies don’t have reverse logistics policies in place. 

Most importantly, USPS was able to position itself as a thought-leader in the field and differentiate itself from the competition. The results were recently published the full report on USPSdelivers.com and it can be found here.