Is your mail getting through?

Is your mail getting through?

By Arthur Middleton Hughes

You have rented fifty lists and created a winning appeal. Your mail shop has done a merge purge, and has put your 3.5 million piece job in the mail. When responses come in, you have net revenue of more than $50,000 after all expenses have been paid. Is this great non-profit fund raising, or what?

Before you get too complacent, what if I told you that you could have gotten a higher response rate -- and that you wasted $159,000 by mailing to people who werenÕt there or were duplicates? This is what many non-profits have been doing for years, without realizing it.

To explain this situation, letÕs see what happens to third class mail once it leaves the mail shop. USPS regulations specify how mail needs to be addressed and sorted to get the maximum postal discount. Third class mail is typically sent in bags or boxes directly to each post office, or each mail man, who is going to deliver the mail. What happens to mail that is not addressed correctly? The mail man doesnÕt send it back. He throws it away. He has no choice. And you will never know about it.

This is a waste of your money. A recent test showed that in a typical large non profit third class mailing, as much as 9% of mail is wasted today, and the non profits doing the mailing donÕt even know it. Here are the results of an analysis of a 3.5 million piece mailing sent by a medium sized non-profit:

Of the 3.5 million actually mailed, 319,662 were either duplicates or undeliverable. At $0.50 each in the mail cost, this non profit wasted $159,831 in this mailing alone.

How can you avoid such costly mistakes? The answer is to spend a little more on your advance mail file processing to assure that your mailing file is processed using the latest industry mail address correction software. Several companies have high quality software of this type, including Acxiom, Merkle and KnowledgeBase Marketing. To illustrate the details, here is what KnowledgeBase Marketing does:

National Change of Address.

This is one of the most useful services ever devised by the US Postal Service. When people move, they notify their local post office of their new address. The form that people fill out is sent to a central location where it is put into a USPS database and sent to service bureaus that are authorized to sell the NCOA^LINK service to mailers. The data can also be obtained directly through the USPS NCOA^LINK service. NCOA^LINK contains approximately 108 million permanent change-of-address (COA) records. Each record contains the relocating postal customerÕs name along with an old and new address. Approximately 40 million change of address forms are filed annually with the USPS. The NCOA^LINK database is updated every week with this information.

Service bureaus running NCOA^LINK usually charge a few cents per hit. That means that you send them your tape of three million names. They will send the tape back with the new addresses of the folks on the tape who have moved. NCOA^LINK changed addresses are kept for four years. About 20% of all households move every year, so running your file through NCOA^LINK can save you a lot of money. Rented lists often contain obsolete addresses.

The Coding Accuracy Support System (CASS) is a USPS certified system that improves the accuracy of delivery point codes, ZIP+4 codes, 5-digit ZIP Codes, and carrier route codes on mail pieces. CASS provides a common platform to measure the quality of address matching software and to diagnose and correct software problems. It appends address quality and type codes to each record.

Delivery Point Validation. DPV contains all delivery point addresses serviced by the US Postal Service. The software confirms that an address actually exists, allowing users of this service to avoid mailing to an invalid address.

Delivery Sequence File - Second Generation. DSF² is an address hygiene tool that provides additional address information about a DPV-verified address to minimize address delivery errors not detected by NCOA^LINK or CASS-certified processing. DSF² processing further classifies an address as business, residential, vacant, seasonal or throwback (i.e. rerouted), and it also identifies the mail delivery method - curbside delivery, door slot, neighborhood delivery and collection box unit (NDCBU) or central delivery.

Address Element Correction . AEC focuses on inaccurate addresses, specifically those addresses that cannot be matched to the national Zip+4 file because of a missing address element. This software corrects or provides missing address elements. It turns problem addresses into accurate addresses or identifies them as potentially undeliverable.

Locatable Address Conversion System LACS enables companies to update their mailing lists when addresses have been converted by local authorities from rural to city style address.

Dynamic Change of Address. Over 30% of people who move never submit a change of address with the USPS. In addition, records on the NCOA^LINK file are dropped 48 months after the move effective date. The KnowledgeBase Marketing DCOA file is compiled from many different sources such as magazine subscriptions, catalog companies, insurance companies. This file retains records of address changes for more than 7 years, including multiple moves and forwarding addresses.

Suppression Services. Besides suppressing your existing customers from your mailing, you will want to suppress people who do not want to receive mail, or should not receive it. This includes the DMA Mail and telephone preference files, state Òdo not callÓ lists, people in prison, and people who have died.

Using these routines for your mail file processing may add $10 per thousand to your initial costs. For the job listed above, that would cost $35,000. But this would have saved the non profit $159,831 - a net increase in revenue from the mailing of $124,831. Not a bad increase for a non profit mailing.

Arthur Middleton Hughes is Vice President of The Database Marketing Institute. Ltd. (Arthur.hughes@dbmarketing.com) which provides strategic advice on relationship marketing. Arthur is also Senior Strategist at e-Dialog.com (ahughes@e-Dialog.com) which provides precision e-mail marketing services for major corporations worldwide. Arthur is the author of Strategic Database Marketing 3rd ed. (McGraw Hill 2006). You may reach Arthur at (954) 767-4558 .

The articles on this web site are available to the general public to read, enjoy and for limited business use. If you want to reprint more than one or two of them for resale or use in a business or educational environment, send an email to Arthur Hughes at arthur.hughes@dbmarketing.com. He will give you permission by return email. The cost, depending on the number of copies you want to reprint, is very inexpensive.