Direct mailers looking to cut costs while increasing effectiveness need look no further than cleansing and qualifying customer and prospect addresses. The solution goes further than simply utilizing address cleansing software, though. Instead, consider employing managed address services to avoid wasted costs and lower response rates resulting from undeliverable-as-addressed (UAA) mail.?
Organizations who distribute a significant amount of direct mail are often unaware of UAA mail’s cost impact. Approximately 3.4% of US Postal Service First-Class Mail is undeliverable because it is UAA. For USPS Standard Mail, which includes marketing and promotional offers for business retention and new business generation, that figure jumps to 6.4 percent. In fact, Standard Mail accounts for 63% of all UAA mail and, unlike First-Class Mail, UAA Standard Mail is destroyed without any notification to the mailer, unless the mailer pays extra fees to the USPS.?
For large mailers, UAA mail represents significant waste, both from a cost and business opportunity perspective. Improving address quality and selection is actually a process that can have long-term benefits. Using a quality managed address services vendor with extensive expertise in understanding this process and in-depth knowledge of postal regulations can help direct mailers understand their current address environment – for example, how did an organization build their address database and what issues are inherent in the design? Who is accessing it and why??
It’s also important for mailers to measure the quality of their addresses — how many addresses are bad, to what degree, and for what reasons? What are the returns on investment of the various services to address the root issues??
Additionally, mailers need to fix the process by determining the proper combination of one time (get it clean) and recurring (keep it clean) operational changes to significantly reduce UAA mail, often by more than 50%. This includes the use of automated tools and services in conjunction with manual operations, all performed by addressing experts.?
By following a “Get it clean, keep it clean” mantra, mailers can reap the benefits of clean addresses for years.?
