Address Hygiene and What You Need to Know
Skyrocketing United States Postal Service (USPS) mailing costs make the cost of doing business steeper. In fact, postage accounts for a significant portion of total transaction printing and mailing costs.
However, people still like and respond to mail making it increasingly important to keep up with address hygiene. Bad addresses don't only cost you in terms of wasted postage, printing and packaging: every piece of mail that fails to reach a customer could potentially be damaging your customer relationships.
Mail is a powerful communication tool, but without the proper systems in place, how do you ensure that customers aren't being bombarded with duplicates of the same mail piece, or even worse, secure customer data isn't ending up in the hands of the wrong recipient? Read on to learn about the true costs of undeliverable-as-addressed (UAA) mail and a few simple steps you can take now to alleviate its burden.
By implementing an address hygiene management strategy, with address validation and change-of-address processing, the potential savings are as follows:
| Annual Mail Volume | Hard Savings | Paper Saved |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000,000 | $20,000 | 3,125 lb. |
| 10,000,000 | $200,000 | 31,250 lb. |
| 50,000,000 | $1,000,000 | 156,250 lb. |
The True Costs of UAA Mail
The main contributor to UAA mail is the estimated 43 million Americans who move each year. More than 17 percent of Americans change their residence each year and nearly 20 percent of all businesses change locations. While some file a change-of-address notice with the USPS, others do not, which results in deterioration to your address database. Industry experts estimate that address databases erode at a rate of 15 percent per year because of moves associated with families, individuals and businesses.
The direct costs of UAA mail are the costs associated with producing and mailing the ultimately undeliverable mail pieces. A First-Class™ mail piece (one ounce letter) costs $0.33 at the 5-digit presort rate category. If you mail 25,000 pieces and 7,000 are undeliverable as addressed – your business wasted $2,310 in postage alone.
Add to that the additional cost to create and print the mail piece – and you face even more of a hit. For instance, if it cost $1.10 to design and print the letter, and 7,000 pieces never get to the right people – that's an additional loss of $5,500 in marketing costs above and beyond the wasted postage, for a total loss of about $7,810.1
Your First Line of Defense
The key to maintaining good data quality is validating customer address information at the point of entry, preventing address errors from entering your database in the first place. Every customer change is an opportunity for data to be entered incorrectly or become out of date.
USPS expertise and postage optimization strategies, such as those provided by Standard Register, can not only identify postage savings and design documents for postage optimization, but also provide process efficiencies through address cleansing programs that decrease UAA and return mail. Dedicated address hygiene software that analyzes customer-supplied mailing lists and change-of-address processing through NCOALink can improve address accuracy and mail deliverability.1
NCOALink – National Change of Address
The NCOALink service makes change-of-address information available to Standard Register in order to help reduce undeliverable mail pieces before mail enters the mail stream. The NCOALink process improves mail deliverability by providing Standard Register with current, standardized, delivery point-coded addresses for individual, family, and business moves.
NCOALink provides Standard Register and our customers with the following benefits:
- Reduces undeliverable-as-addressed (UAA) mail by providing the most current address information for matches made to the NCOALink File.
- Reduces mailer costs by reducing the number of undeliverable mail pieces through the use of the most current address information.
- Provides the opportunity for faster product/service marketing through accurate mail delivery.
- NCOALink return codes provide explanation of match and non-match status.
Practical Solutions
Reducing undeliverable mail can be achieved easily and cost-effectively with the use of proper address management practices. Even companies that don't do a lot of mailing can benefit. Private sector companies estimate the cost of returned or undeliverable mail at more than $3 per piece. That's a costly hit to a company's bottom line.
Implementing a smart address management strategy that includes address validation and change-of-address processing will not only provide immediate ROI in the form of cost-savings, but also give you more opportunities to build your brand and stronger relationships with your customers.
Standard Register's print and mail services provide practical solutions that will help you more effectively serve and communicate with customers while complying with regulations and reducing total operating costs. From advanced address hygiene and data management tools, selective messaging and marketing, to distributed mail production and delivery processes, Standard Register reduces delivery times, improves accuracy rates, enables advanced marketing and messaging, and enhances the overall effectiveness of your customer communication strategies. To learn more, contact us today.
1 "Where Did My Customers Go? The Problem of Undeliverable-As-Addressed Mail" white paper, Melissa Data, 2009.