Undeliverable mail is often a hidden cost that raises your overall expenses. It also impacts the deliverability of mission-critical communications. Both of these problems affect your print and mail operations.
So, what are these costs, and how can you reduce them?
The Real Costs of Undeliverable Mail
According to Pitney Bowes, the cost of returned mail can range from $3 to $25 per piece. These expenses can quickly become a significant issue.
Here’s a breakdown of what leads to these costs:
- Sunk production costs: Paper, ink, toner, and original postage
- Second mailing: Updating addresses and resending
- Database updates: Any technology costs associated with revising addresses
- Operational bottlenecks and manual workflows: Increases in labor costs
- Lost revenue: Delaying statements means slower payments
- Compliance penalties: High return rates could disqualify your mailings from automation
Avoiding all this is possible with address hygiene tools.
Reducing Undeliverable Mail with Address Hygiene Tools
Address hygiene involves using technology and processes to verify addresses. It typically includes these elements:
- Standardization of the format of addresses to align with postal regulations
- Validation that the address exists and can receive mail
- Cleansing data to fix errors
- Duplicate address removal
- Comparing current addresses to electronic address changes submitted to USPS and updating as necessary
These capabilities operationalize address verification to be part of the workflow. It occurs before any document prints. Creating such an infrastructure requires deep investment and expertise. It’s not something you can scale unless you are a professional print and mail company.
Top Benefits of Address Hygiene
Undeliverable mail is a burden. You’ll realize these advantages by working with a third-party solely dedicated to transactional print and mail.
Reduce your postage costs: The system rejects undeliverable addresses, so there’s no waste.
Ensure compliance: The service provided by professionals always aligns with regulatory requirements.
Improve accuracy: You’ll receive address updates to your files, ensuring more precision in your mailings.
How Address Hygiene Works
In our solution, PCI Scrub, we created a tool to address undeliverable mail. The program automatically identifies and intercepts any incomplete or inaccurate addresses. It combines proprietary technology with the USPS Intelligent Mail® Barcode (IMb) and other databases, including:
- NCOALink: The USPS maintains the NCOA (National Change of Address), which represents all permanent change-of-address records submitted within the past 48 months. It updates weekly.
- Address Element Correction (AEC): The USPS created this quality process to increase the accuracy of addressed mail. It uses computer logic to correct common misspellings or other errors.
- Pixie: We developed this database for address scrubbing. It has known bad addresses from a large client pool. Pixie eliminates bad addresses prior to printing.
When the platform finds an updated address, it updates immediately. With this in place, you can significantly lower the hard and soft costs of undeliverable mail.
Don’t Let Undeliverable Mail Raise Your Costs
By combining technology and data sets, you can quickly find and address bad addresses. As a result, you won’t have to pay postage twice, and you won’t waste materials. Address hygiene is just one of the unique capabilities we offer.
Learn about it and more by contacting our experts today.
