Address Verification Reduces Undelivered Mail Costs: Infographic
Posted by Chris Leithe on Fri, Dec 23, 2011
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Returned mail and packages means wasted time and money, as well as unsatisfied customers. This is why it is essential that businesses validate their customers’ mailing addresses before sending mail.
Costs
- The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) estimates that data quality problems associated with customer contact data alone cost U.S. businesses more than $600 billion a year in postage, printing and staff overhead.
- A study of 599 businesses by Pricewaterhouse Coopers led them to estimate that bad data is costing businesses $1.4 billion a year in accounting, billing and inventory snafus.
Volume
- 1998 - 9.3 billion pieces (4.71% of total mail volume)
- 2010 - 6.9 billion pieces (4.11% of total mail volume)
- This reduction, while significant, falls far short of previous Post Master General Jack Potter’s goal of reducing UAA mail by 50% by 2010.
- Periodicals mail, for example, has a UAA percentage of about 1.5%, Standard Mail usually runs about 6.75%.
Three ways USPS handles UAA mail
- Volumes of UAA mail that the USPS forwards or treats as waste both experienced declines, but the volume of UAA mail that the USPS returns to sender actually increased. [ Return 23% - Trash 59% - Forward 18%]
- Primary cause of UAA mail is consumer moves. Up to 40% of all moves are not reported to the USPS.
Value of Correcting your data
- 1,000,000 piece mailing x 5% (average UAA rate) is 50,000 pieces.
- 50,000 pieces x 29 cents / mailing = $14,500
- For a total value of data correction about $64,500
Bad Addressing Issues
- City, state, or ZIP Code™ missing or in conflict
- Missing or incorrect secondary address information
- Incorrect company legal name or reference name
- Extraneous information in name field
- Trailing space after name or address
- Dual names
- Misspelled words / Improper abbreviations
- Missing or wrong street, directional, prefix, suffix
Weight
- The USPS Generated over 300,000 tons Undeliverable Standard Mail and discarded lobby mail
- 300K tons = 66,500 elephants ( Average Elephant weighs 4.5 tons )
The Dead Letter Office
- United States Postal Service sorting center in Topeka, Kansas. Aka, the Dead Letter Office.
- Classification as a dead letter is one of the few instances where postal personnel are allowed to violate secrecy of correspondence, ostensibly to search for clues as to the letter's origin or destination.
- Some very valuable items have turned up in undeliverable mail, including a stolen painting by Marc Chagall, “Study for Over Vitebsk”