In a time of supply chain snarls, paper shortages, higher inflation, and ever-increasing customer expectations, now is the best time to look beyond simple address cleansing and find the types of services that set you apart from the competition. By providing efficient mailing services to your customers, you can help them create effective direct marketing campaigns that not only qualify for the lowest postage rates, but also generate more revenue. Make it your New Year’s resolution to look outside the box (or envelope) for ways to provide value-added services that make your clients more successful in 2023.
Start with the Basics
Utilizing CASS Certified software and a 48-month NCOALink service is the best process for correcting addresses and updating the addresses for customers who have moved. Not only do these services improve deliverability and lower postage costs, but they increase return on investment by reducing unnecessary costs associated with undeliverable-as-addressed mail: wasted postage, production, and printing costs because they identify movers before you print and mail pieces to recipients.
Go Beyond with Additional Data Enrichment Services
In addition to 48-month USPS NCOALink processing that identifies the most recent permanent moves reported to the USPS (approximately 160 million permanent change of address records), you can provide additional data enrichment services that go beyond what the USPS offers to improve mail deliverability and campaign performance, including linking apartment numbers, identifying movers who haven’t filed a USPS change-of-address form and suppressing records on do-not-mail lists.
Using persistent address key technology, it is easy to append missing apartment numbers and/or suite information for incomplete addresses. This not only helps you contact more of the people on your mailing list, but it also improves the results during NCOA Link processing since you have the most complete address to match against the USPS dataset.
Speaking of NCOA Link – it is a super valuable resource to identify individuals, families and companies that have moved. However, each year thousands of people move without submitting change-of-address forms to the USPS. In fact, almost 40% of movers each year (approximately 11% of the US population) do not file a change of address with the USPS. To identify these “hidden” movers, you can utilize a service like Proprietary Change of Address (PCOA) or Multiple Change of Address (MCOA). These services utilize data from other institutions including credit bureaus, magazine subscriptions, credit card companies, and other sources to identify movers not included in the USPS NCOALink dataset. Depending on how current the list is and demographics, this process can result in upwards of a 20% increase in the number of moves identified in your mailing list.
The last way to increase the cost-effectiveness of your clients’ mailings is to identify and mail only to those people who are willing and able to respond. An easy way to do this is through a list suppression service that will identify individuals on your mailing list who are either deceased, incarcerated or have indicated they do not want to receive mail from marketers.
Greg Brown is Vice President of Global Marketing at Melissa, an address verification and data quality company located in Rancho Santa Margarita, California.
