Managing Customer Deliverability Expectations

You have a mailing list in hand that you know or expect to be old. You expect the undeliverable rate will be high. You know your customer will freak out when 20% or more of the pieces are returned. What can you do? Your options include:

• Use Standard Mail (if possible) so no undeliverable pieces are returned and the customer never knows how many pieces aren’t delivered,
• Manually verify all the names and addresses (good luck!), or
• Discuss the likely results with the customer.

We recommend the last option. Getting a big batch of mail pieces returned does have an upside, however you better make sure your customer understands this before it happens.

First, make sure the customer actually wants a targeted mailing list to use in the not-too-distant future. If not, perhaps you want to discuss EDDM or other options. If the goal is to have a targeted mailing list, then a discussion about cleansing the old list is in order.

You can offer to NCOA the old list to pick up address changes back to 48 months rather than the typical 18 months. This gets you a search of all the NCOA records available. It costs more and should improve deliverability by a few percentage points. However, it will not overcome the “exact match” privacy limitations of the NCOA process (see the previous blog Handling Lousy Mailing Lists).

You can discuss non-USPS address validation with your customer. This should identify more bad or changed addresses. However,there is no guarantee this will change the old list from lousy to great, or even good. The issue here is how you determine that the improvement in deliverability is cost effective.

Ultimately, the surest way to fix the old list is to do a mailing and take the hit on the inevitable un-deliverables. However, once this is done and the undeliverable addresses are scrubbed from the old mailing list, you have a much higher quality mailing list. The “new” mailing list will not be perfect but no mailing list is ever perfect. The use and maintenance of a mailing list is the only way to keep deliverable rates high.

You could save some money by mailing “cheap and dirty” piece. The undeliverables will never see it, however the targeted recipients who do receive it may end up with a poor impression of you. The cost savings of this approach may not be worth the long-term results.

A scrubbed mailing list has numerous benefits. First, and foremost, is the knowledge that a high percentage of the mailed pieces will reach the intended audience. Subsequent mailings (in weeks or a few months) might be sent at discounted postage rates with a high degree of confidence of good delivery rates. Alternating First Class and Standard mailings is a way minimize costs  while keeping the mailing list in good shape. With a good mailing list, you can also discuss a number of other options to help increase your customers’ response rates and business such as data enhancement and personalization with variable data printing.

When a customer hands you a lousy mailing list, look it as an opportunity to generate more business for yourself and your customer. The customer looks to you for your expertise in mailing and expects you to work magic. So, work your magic by managing expectations.