AMiable Solution #205: KO the UAA

The United State Postal Service identifies mail as undeliverable for one of seven reasons:

• ·        no postage
• ·        incomplete, illegible, or incorrect address
• ·        addressee not at address
• ·        mail unclaimed
• ·        mail refused by the addressee at the time of delivery
• ·        mail refused by addressee after delivery when permitted
• ·        minimum criteria for mailability not met.

You can eliminate or at least greatly reduce the occurrence of two of those reasons-- incomplete, illegible, or incorrect address; addressee not at address--by keeping your mailing list clean.

Clean lists start with careful input.  No matter who’s entering the information, whether customer service, marketing, or sales, that information has to be accurate from the get-go.  That sometimes means taking longer than usual to enter a name and address into the system, and it sometimes takes a phone call or other follow-up to verify the information with the client or member. 

But that’s time well spent.  Horizontech Inc., a global information technology services organization, reported in its May 2011 “HTI Base Statistics on UAA Mail” report that the USPS receives 6.9 billion pieces of Undeliverable-As-Addressed (UAA) mail every year at a cost of approximately $1.4 billion annually. 

Why waste money developing, printing, and mailing something that’s never going to get anywhere?

Once a contact is in your database, keeping it current is key.  Out-of-date or inaccurate addresses accounted for more than 68% of UAA mail in July 2016, according to the USPS’s online report of nixie volume by mailing industry. 

Keep your addresses deliverable by running a merge purge on your house list, and any big mailings with multiple rentals, at least once a year.  You can buy your own software, but your best bet is to let a data processing company run the merge purge for you.  Your data processing company may be your mailhouse or an independent provider, but it should have the resources and tools (NCOA, LACS, and CASS) you need to clean up your list and take advantage of postage discounts.

As the saying goes, you can’t squeeze blood from a turnip, and you can’t deliver sales from an undeliverable mailpiece.  A clean database is a happy place.