List Hygiene — ABCs of Improving Address Quality
There’s no escaping the fact that direct mail just doesn’t work with a bad address. The most compelling creative printed on the finest brochure is useless if it doesn’t get to the intended recipient.
Why should that matter to you? The ultimate responsibility lies with your customer and their mailing list, after all. If they give you a bad address and you print and mail it correctly, it isn’t your fault if it doesn’t get delivered. That reaction will probably hold up in court but, in business, you need to do better.
The more you work with your customers’ data, the more they will depend on you as a value-added resource. Data work can also give you an opportunity to add to your bottom line.
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) wants to help you improve your address quality…or else! New move update and ZIP+4 rules will make address quality more important than ever in securing the lowest possible postage rates.
You can interact with your clients on a number of levels when dealing with their address data. You can simply run the addresses through a basic CASS certification, get into additional address processes such as NCOA (National Change Of Address), or house the data for them and provide a whole range of address quality services. Each level has its own costs and benefits.
Commodity or Partner?
You will need to develop a great deal of expertise and resources to house client address data, but it can easily increase your customers’ loyalty. You may also find that when you provide a larger range of services, you are viewed less and less as a commodity, and more as a partner. Partners get paid better.
There really is nothing complex about assuring address quality. It involves creating a process that does a lot of little things correctly on a regular basis. The USPS suggests appointing a “Data Custodian” to oversee your mailing lists. (I prefer the title “Data Czar.”) The Data Custodian (DC) can be an individual in your organization or an outside resource, like a local mailing and fulfillment company. Either way, the DC is responsible for making sure all of your addresses are correct and current.
These are two distinct and important qualities that are essential to maintaining a good list—accuracy and currency. The address has to be correct, and the person needs to be at that accurate address. The address can perfectly describe and identify a building, but if your prospect has moved out, that address is no longer current or of great value.
Address Accuracy a Must
The accuracy of an address refers to having the address formatted correctly and being sure that the address actually exists. This can be a more complex process than you may think. Running an address through the CASS certification process will often identify and correct many obvious problems, such as street misspellings, mistaken abbreviations and the like, while adding a correct ZIP+4. Just because an address passes CASS certification does not mean it actually exists. CASS software only matches on address ranges, so as long as the block exists, an incorrect address may pass.
In August, the Postal Service will require DPV (Delivery Point Validation) as part of the CASS process. DPV uses a more extensive database than CASS, and an address that matches on DPV does indeed exist and is properly formatted.
Currently, a typical address list will get a 90 percent to 95 percent match rate on CASS certification. In other words, 5 to 10 percent of the addresses won’t get a ZIP+4. Expect that to get worse when the DPV requirement kicks in. What should you do with these misbehaving addresses?
Well, you can choose to not mail them—that would reduce your postage, since these “non-qualified” pieces would be subject to a higher postage rate. The only problem with just deleting the addresses is that 60 percent of those addresses will generally be delivered.
That’s a lot of prospects to ignore, or worse still, subscribers to aggravate. If the list is subscribers or association members, you may want to work with your client to have them send mailings to those non-CASS addresses to ask for better addresses.
An address like “3rd Street & Main Street” may get delivered, but it’s not going to get a ZIP+4. As the Postal Service strives to identify bad addresses further upstream, addresses like these may become less deliverable.
The USPS also offers some tools for enhancing non-ZIP+4 addresses. One service is called Address Element Correction (AEC). With AEC, the Postal Service will match your non-ZIP+4 addresses against its own in-house database with some advanced software that can do things CASS software cannot. The results are not always wonderful, as the system often goes to default values that may inhibit delivery.
There is also the more expensive AEC II, which uses Delivery Force Knowledge, or DFK, to get correct addresses. The layman term for DFK is “asking the carrier.” AEC II can take up to 60 days.
One of the best ways to have correct addresses is to start with correct addresses. For small operations, data entry staff can go to USPS.com to look up the ZIP+4 and get a correct format at the beginning. For larger companies, there are software packages and systems that can verify addresses as they are entered. Helping your clients at this early stage can be a revenue source and make you indispensable to your customers.
Accurate as the address may be with CASS, DPV, AEC, AEC II—and satellite photographs to verify the location and address of a house—if the prospect moves and neglects to tell the list owner, it’s all in vain.
The USPS does not enjoy forwarding mail. Currently discounted First Class mail requires that you attest that the addresses have been updated recently. Failure to do so can result in loss of postal discounts for the entire mailing. Expect those requirements to migrate to Standard and Periodical mail in the coming years.
There are a few ways to meet the requirements. The best known is NCOA Link. NCOA Link provides a service for matching address lists against changes filed by movers diligent enough to file an address change.
Changing Addresses
Another service that will meet the requirements is ACS (Address Change Service). This service provides electronic notices of address changes as the mail moves through the Postal Service. It is fairly complicated to participate in, and requires special codes to be printed in the address block.
The USPS has just released a simplified version that makes use of the new Intelligent Mail Barcode, called OneCode ACS. It provides a very inexpensive and manageable way to get address correction data.
Ultimately, you need to decide just how involved you want to get in your customers’ mailing lists. You can serve your own interests, as well as theirs, by knowing all of the tools that are at your disposal. PI
About the Author
Dave Lewis is the president of ProList, a Maryland-based direct mail firm. He is also president of trackmymail.com, a Web-based mail tracking company. Lewis can be reached by e-mailing dlewis@trackmymail.com or by calling (888) 444-9972.
Resource Links
USPS ZIP+4: http://www.usps.com/ncsc/ziplookup/vendorslicensees.htm
OneCode ACS: http://ribbs.usps.gov/doc/OneCode_ACS.pdf
