Commercial Printing & Mailing Services
Did you know around 35 million people move each year?
Since a mailing list is vital to the success of a mailing, how can you know the condition of your mailing list BEFORE you mail?
The only way is to have software that is specifically designed to manage and maintain mailing lists, along with someone that has knowledge and experience in mailing list maintenance. Any other method will yield only marginal results.
Let's look at an example:
Recently a customer brought in a mailing. They had done a mailing themselves a few months prior, using First Class stamps with the endorsement “Return Service Requested”.
Any pieces that weren’t delivered should be returned. They thought this would allow them to clean up their mailing list.
The mailing list was over 8 years old and hadn’t been actively maintained until recently. That is a major problem, as the Post Office only maintains Change of Address information for 18 months.
The software I use maintains this information for 4 years. After 4 years, it becomes much more costly to update the address.
But mailing repeatedly to a “dead” address is also expensive.
Another thing about the previous mailing – the sales results weren’t all that impressive.
After receiving the mailing list, I began our normal clean up and certification process.
This is a process we’ve developed over the last 45+ years. It not only meets the required Postal certifications for mailing, it also goes more deeply in finding & fixing problem addresses.
It’s important to remember the statistics below are AFTER the customer had done considerable updating themselves.
Of almost 2,800 records, 1,865 records had problems with their data.
Next I ran the required Postal CASS certification.
Seventy-nine records could not be computer verified. Of those 79, I could manually correct 13. Sixty-six records were sent back to the customer for correction. Since time was of the essence, they deleted the 66 records.
Then I did the required Postal NCOA (Change of Address).
This returned 229 updated records, with 216 having new addresses and 13 having no forwarding address. The customer elected to delete the 13 records.
Next I did several other checks on the mailing list.
This yielded another 178 problem addresses that were removed from the mailing, some of those being 108 duplicate addresses.
I started with almost 2,800 records that the customer had done their best to clean up. I ended with 2,550 records that passed my cleaning process.
The final result was 250 records removed that most likely would never have been delivered, or almost 10% of the quantity mailed.
And all the information about the problem addresses was returned to my customer so they could research and possibly regain contact with their customer.
A “lost” customer is lost sales.
The difference between my customer’s attempt at cleaning and mine was experience, the right software and knowing how to use it.
If your mailer isn’t giving you reports back about what they find in your mailing list, then there’s a good chance they’re only doing the required minimum Postal certifications without checking on why an address failed.
Without those reports, it is much more difficult for you to keep your customer database up to date.
You worked hard to create your customer list. Let us help you keep your customer by telling you when they move or if there is a problem with their address.
We can clean up your mailing list. We know specifically what to do and have tools specific to the task.
And that’s how you can know the condition of your mailing list BEFORE you mail.