Mining a Mailing List for Gold

Most people see a mailing list as a simple collection of names and addresses. We see a mailing list as an opportunity to know your customers or recipients better. This knowledge makes it possible to focus your message, promotions or appeals to match and provide more value to the recipient. And, making your communication valuable is key to increasing response rates, selling more products and services, receiving more donations, acquiring new customers…whatever your communication goal might be. In the following, we explore some of the “gold” you can get from your mailing list.

Geographic Location – The town or city and street addresses provide you details such as the school district, local schools, voting district, fire and tax districts, cable, water, sewer and utility companies, etc. for those addresses.

Location Demographics – While a town/city and street addresses provides specific information about locations they also give a reasonable idea about the demographics of those living at those locations. For example, it’s easy to identify the relative affluence of neighborhoods or different areas. This information then suggests with reasonable certainty characteristics such as minimum annual income, typical education level, home value, etc. Regardless the business, this if often very valuable to identify target audiences or target areas.

Residence type – Residence type (apartment versus single family home) often provides good clues about a person’s lifestyle. For example, apartment dwellers typically do not own lawn mowers or have need for landscaping, roofing, plumbing or electrical services. The opposite is true for those living in single family dwellings. Addresses that include “Apt.”, “Bldg.”, “Unit”, etc. are most likely apartments and may be identified as such by the USPS address processing software.

Prefixes – Prefixes can tell you about the recipient’s gender, likely marital status, education level and occupation. “Mr.”, “Mrs.”, “Miss” and “Ms.” are dead giveaways for gender and potential indicators of marital status for women (don’t take the marital status as a certainty, however). “Rev”, “Fr” (Father), “Dr”, “Atty”, “Prof”, Hon (Honorable) and the whole gamut of military ranks provide good clues about occupation and possibly education level.

Suffixes - Suffixes are sometimes called post nominal letters meaning “letters after the name”. They might start to look like alphabet soup, but they can tell you a lot about the recipient. Some common suffixes include “J.D.” and “Esq. (lawyers), “MD”, “OD”, “DO” and “DMD” (doctors), “CPA”, “CMA” and “ABA” (accountants)…and there are hundreds more! Suffixes provide very specific detail about occupation and education level which can be assumed to a relative gauge of income level and other characteristics.

Gender – Having a gender field (male/female or M/F) in a mailing list is a huge benefit since gender is a major differentiation for many communications. It might be sexist, but very few men like to shop for women’s undergarments. Similarly, not many women shop for hi-performance truck accessories. If your mailing list doesn’t have a gender field, there are techniques for creating one from the addressees’ names.

Do you ask customers about their mailing lists? Some of them might be quite interested to know more about their customer base or their market. This information helps determine if they are sending the wrong message, sending to the wrong audience or missing a key element to get more attention or business. You simply can’t know without mining the gold from a mailing list.

We can help you with this. PrintShopMarketing.com

Re-Think Mailing

It’s no surprise. Given the general downturn in mailing volume (see graph below), many print shop owners are questioning why they should spend several thousand dollars to renew their address presort and processing software. That question usually leads to other questions about printing and VDP software as well all of the time, cost and risk of doing mailing jobs. Add to those more questions about what’s in store regarding the USPS’ delayed Full Service Intelligent Mail Barcode program.

Fortunately, we have an answer. You can outsource all of your data merge and clean up, address list processing and print file creation work to us. You do what you do best: design, printing, finishing, etc. You simply send us mailing lists and artwork. We do all the hard stuff and deliver to you pre-addressed and pre-sorted, printer-ready VDP files imposed and ordered the way you want.

That means there is no software to buy, learn, update or renew or specials skills to learn. It also means you and your staff have more time to do important things such as selling, serving customers and all those things that make your business profitable. You also will likely also come to realize that by outsourcing you have gained a whole new set of capabilities from more data and data management services to all types of personalization and advanced VDP solutions.

Is it time for you to re-think your mailing process? If it is, give us a call.

Digital Formatting Services

USPS = VDP

Maybe you missed the memo. Just in case, we’ll give you the message again:

"You can’t do variable data printing (VDP) unless you do mailing in-house! No mailing…no VDP!"

It should be obvious. Let’s say you use VDP to print a thousand postcards personalized with the recipients’ first names and the data and the amount of their last donation to the charity sending the postcards. How do you now put mailing addresses on those postcards after you’ve printed them? Send the postcards and the mailing list to the mail house and have them do it? Wrong! You don’t have a way to match each personalized postcard to right correct mailing address. It’s impossible to apply addresses to personalized pieces after they’ve been printed unless it’s done manually. 

When you use VDP to personalize printed pieces, the mailing addresses must be included on the pieces at the time the print files are created. In this way, the personalized pieces come out with the mailing addresses already on them. There’s no way to make a mistake addressing and no need to have the pieces addressed later. However, you end up with postcards ready to be mailed. What do you do?

Why not just mail them?

If the postcards have a mailing permit indicated on them, it’s near certainty someone has created a set of documentation for presentation at the Post Office to mail the postcards. All you need to do is to put the pieces in the proper mailing containers – available free at your local USPS location.

The bottom line…there’s no point in even considering doing variable data printing until you’ve figured out how to do VDP addressing and in-house mailing. Personalized pieces have to be accurately delivered to recipients and this is nearly always done via direct mail. The few cases of VDP that don’t require mailing are limited to things such as sequentially numbered forms, event tickets or giveaway pieces with tracking numbers or URLs.

When you're ready to do your in-house mailing and move on to VDP...give us a call. We're the experts at helping digital print shops grow.

Handling Lousy Mailing Lists

What do you do when a print customer hands you a mailing list that hasn’t been used in years? You could assure the customer you’ll process the list through the NCOA to identify bad or changed addresses. That solves the problem. Right?

When you get 20% or more of the mailed pieces returned as undeliverable, there’s bound to be some blowback. At best, the customer is going to wonder what went wrong…more likely, what you did wrong. Now what? You can rip the list to shreds while cursing at the customer for having a terrible list. Explain how you are filing a formal complaint with the USPS about shoddy service. Suddenly pretend you don’t speak English. In tough situations, claim you need emergency treatment after being attacked by a spider high on toner. Or, be better prepared when you are handed a potentially lousy mailing list.

Let’s start with what to do when you get the suspicious list and discuss your options for maximizing the deliverability rate (or at least avoid the blame for lots of returned pieces).

Start by asking a few pertinent questions:

• Where did the list come from?
• When was it used last?
• Was/is it updated regularly?
• What’s the purpose of the mailing? (e.g. carpet bombing or precision strikes)

If the answers are along the lines of “rented it”, “it’s old”, “years ago”, “I don’t remember” and “I don’t know”, there are your red flags.

Fixing Mailing List Delivery Problems

The customer probably expects (or hopes) that you wave a magic wand to turn his lousy mailing list into gold. If you expect that the NCOA (National Change of Address) processing will keep the undeliverable rate low for an old, dubious list - think again!

Consider these points about mailing lists, the NCOA process and deliverability:

• Estimates are that more than 40 million (about 15%) American addresses change each year, but some 15 to 20% of people move without filling out a change of address notice. So, that two-year old mailing list could have 30% of the addresses changed, but only 24% of those changes may be known by the USPS.

• The NCOA is not an address validator. Simply because the NCOA process does not “flag” a record does not mean the piece will be deliverable. The NCOA will only flag those records where a valid change of address notice is on file or those identified as a “nixie” (undeliverable-as-addressed for whatever reason) by the USPS.

• For the consumers’ privacy protection, the NCOA process requires an exact match of name and address in the mailing list (with some nicknames and misspellings excepted). If a mailing list record does not match the name and address on file in the NCOA database, no new address information is provided nor will the address be flagged as being invalid. Because this is such a common misunderstanding, we’ll say it a second time: 

If a name and address in your mailing list do not exactly match the name and address in the NCOA database, it is very unlikely you will receive any sort of information to indicate there is anything wrong with the address. If you do get some information, it will be because: 1) someone has a correct and current change of address notice on file, or 2) the USPS has identified an issue delivering mail to that address.

• The older the list, the more mismatched names and addresses that will likely pass through the NCOA “unflagged” and the more returned pieces.

• The age and maintenance of a mailing list affects deliverability but other factors such as address type (residential, business, etc.), demographics (young, old, students, families, singles, etc.) and the time of year (holidays, vacations, snowbirds, etc.) can also have an affect.

• Undeliverable First Class mail is returned to the sender but undeliverable Standard mail goes in the trash.

• There are non-USPS services that offer to validate addresses. This done by comparing a mailing list to privately owned, frequently used, mailing lists (credit bureaus, insurance companies, magazines, etc.). However, the cost of these services may not be justifiable.

See how counting on the NCOA process can lead you into a deep pile of muck when your customer’s list is lousy?

We’ll help you out of the muck in the next blog.