Mail is under attack from an arsenal of more efficient and less costly technologies. This is particularly true of First Class mail, which is increasingly being supplanted by electronic banking, billing, e-mail and fax. Even my Mom, a great-grandmother and self-professed technophobe, is more likely to click the send button than lick a stamp.
Still, mail remains one of the most effective, reliable and certainly least intrusive means of getting your message to customers and prospective customers alike. The relatively low cost and high speed of e-mail or even fax broadcasting have a certain allure. But legal issues aside, the ease and inexpensive nature of these systems are actually helping them become increasingly ineffective: Your message is likely to be drowned in a sea of spam. (Not to mention that fax and e-mail marketing, to recipients, is increasingly becoming the business equivalent of the dinnertime call that tries to get you to change long-distance service providers.) E-mail or fax advocates will point to favorable response rates from these venues. But for every positive response, you risk annoying countless others who consider their inboxes or fax trays their own private property and they simply did not invite you in.
On the other hand, studies show most people enjoy getting mail yes, even advertising mail. But the containment of postage rates, not to mention the very future of mail as a reliable and effective medium, is inextricably linked to the quality of each individual address in a list. After more than a decade spent stressing address quality, the U.S. Postal Service recently released statistics designating 23% of all mail as Undeliverable As Addressed (UAA). Clearly, no one can ever respond to a mailpiece's message if that mailpiece is never properly delivered. Fortunately, an increasing number of tools are available to help mailers improve the quality of their addresses thereby increasing the odds that the piece will be delivered, without unnecessary delay, to the intended recipient.
The CASS process is the first step in "cleaning" an address list. An address that has been matched to Postal Service ZIP+4 files has a much greater chance of being delivered than one that has not. Any addresses that cannot be assigned · a ZIP+4 are UAA; they might still get delivered, but there is some basic problem that will interfere with the process. When sending UAA mail at Standard rates, the odds of them being delivered are significantly lower than properly ZIP+4 encoded pieces and, in fact, the greater likelihood is that they will simply be discarded by the Postal Service. If mailing a marketing piece, my advice is to simply omit any UAA records first. If the mailing is to a membership or customer list, send UAA pieces First Class or use a special endorsement such as "Address Service Requested."
For membership or customer list records that cannot be matched to a ZIP+4 file, or for any such records that will be used in multiple mailings, the Postal Service offers Address Element Correction (AEC), a lightly publicized but highly effective fee-based service that processes otherwise unmatchable records. At a modest 15. per input record ($15 minimum), AEC is probably the least expensive method available to correct and assign a ZIP+4 to these records, thus improving their chance of deliverability. (For details about this service, visit www.usps.com and enter "AEC" in the Search field.)
The CASS process can be considered a quick and dirty coarse filter that quickly separates good addresses from bad. But CASS approval does not guarantee deliverability; there are many reasons a ZIP+4 Coded address may not be delivered. For one thing, the CASS process only verifies that a given input address is within a specified range of possible street or box numbers. The relatively new Delivery Point Validation (DPV) process, available from a number of mailing software developers or as a separate service, goes a step beyond CASS and verifies that the input address physically exists.
Another common address problem is a consequence of the fact that more than 40 million Americans move every year; on average, nearly one-quarter of the records in a two-year-old mailing list have moved. If you mail to this list at First Class discounted rates, the Postal Service requires that some form of Move Update processing be performed first. After all, the Postal Service bears the costly burden of attempting to forward this mail. No such requirement currently exists for a Standard Mail job, but mailing at Standard Mail rates to someone who has moved is essentially equivalent to positioning a dumpster at the end of your production line. Because the Postal Service does not attempt to forward Standard Mail, that's where the average one-fourth of your list will end up.
The most thorough, proactive method of updating a list with change of address information is NCOA processing. Currently, NCOA processing is only available through a limited number of NCOA licensees or their brokers, but early this fall, a new and equivalent service called NCOALink will be available to any qualified mailer. The Postal Service expects that the introduction of NCOALink will increase the availability of NCOA processing and consequently lower both the cost and the turnaround time of this essential process.
There is a whole other category of "bad" addresses that are probably destined to end up in a Postal Service recycle bin: those that have been changed by local governments, usually to make them "locatable" by 911 emergency response services. (The most common example: Rural Route addresses, which are fast becoming history.) The Postal Service maintains a database of these converted addresses in its Locatable Address Conversion System (LACS), a database that includes more than five million records. LACS processing converts old-style Rural Route addresses to 911-friendly records and has been available from NCOA licensees for many years. The Postal Service will soon announce a new product called LACSLink that is similar to NCOALink and should have a similar effect on price and availability.
Finally, there are those who simply do not want to receive unsolicited advertising mail. For them, the Direct
If UAA mail were eliminated from the mail stream, current postage rates could be maintained well into the future and perhaps equally important, response rates would increase significantly while in the process, production, print and mailing costs would plummet. For example, assume you are mailing to a 10,000-record sample with a total cost projection of a dollar per record and an anticipated 50% response rate. Eliminating UAA mail beforehand would save nearly $2,500 and boost response by almost 15%.
The mailing industry is an indubitably essential element to maintaining the strength of every level of our economy, from global considerations all the way down to the "mom-and-pop" store. The complexity of the system demands our vigilance and cooperation to preserve mailing not only as a vital distribution resource, but as a profitable one as well.
K. Jon Runstrom is the president and CEO, BCC Software, Inc. For more information, visit www.bccsoftware.com.
