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Advertising Mail Compliance
06-10-2025

Royal Mail Advertising Mail offers a postage discount on standard access, provided the content of the items meeting the requirements set out in the Access Letters Contract. 

 

We acknowledge and support the work being done by customers to ensure compliance, which is essential to maintaining fair and consistent standards across the letters postal market. We have also listened to recent concerns from some customers about possible misunderstandings within the upstream supply chain regarding the requirements for Advertising Mail.

 

As a reminder, to continue benefiting from the Advertising Mail discount it’s important to ensure compliance with the requirements set out in the Access Letters Contract. These include (but are not limited to):

 

  1. Ensuring the items and the content qualify as Advertising Mail or Partially Addressed Mail. This is particularly important in relation to programmatic mail communications. (i.e. they consist of a largely uniform message and aim to promote products, services or support for a cause.

 

  1. Providing a valid Advertising Mail or Partially Addressed Mail sample/seed, including the correct UCID;

 

  1. Ensuring each Advertising Mail posting contains a minimum of 4000 items, and in the case of Partially Addressed Mail postings a minimum of 10,000 items.

 

  1. For Partially Addressed Mail, ensuring each posting is posted to each household in a targeted postcode.

 

For clarity if different Advertising Mail items and Partially Address Mail items are consolidated into the same single posting, they must be declared as Business Mail. Consolidating different posting items is not permitted under the Advertising Mail and Partially Addressed Mail services.

 

For full details of the contractual requirements please refer to Schedule 4, Part 1 of the Access Letters Contract and Appendices G and I of the Access User Guide.

 

We remain committed to supporting a fair and transparent postal market and will continue working closely with you and industry bodies such as the Strategic Mailing Partnership to help improve compliance across the sector.