As our children begin a new school year, we thought it would be a great time to post some “study notes” on the data hygiene services Franklin performs on your mail files. These services ensure that your mail is delivered quickly and accurately at the lowest possible postage rate.
CASS (Coding Accuracy Support System) software corrects and standardizes mailing addresses. It will also add missing address information, such as ZIP codes, cities, and states to ensure a mailing address is complete. It will also perform delivery point validation to verify whether or not a mailing address is a deliverable address and check against the USPS system to update addresses that have been renamed or renumbered. For records that cannot be CASS-certified with a Zip+4, the software will provide information on what is bad/missing. CASS ensures that your mail is delivered as quickly as possible, at the lowest possible postage rate tier; it also ensures you are not spending production and postage costs to mail pieces that are undeliverable.
De-Duping software checks your mailing file for duplicate records (based on whatever criteria you decide – Name only, Name and Address, Name Address and Date of Birth, etc) and removes any duplicate records. This ensures you are not paying production and postage costs for unnecessary mail pieces.
NCOA (National Change of Address) software takes the names and addresses in your mailing list and matches them against approximately 160 million permanent change-of-address (COA) records consisting of the names and addresses of individuals, families and businesses who have filed a change-of-address with the USPS. For any matches that are found, we can mail to the new/updated addresses as far back as 18 months, and provide those matches back to you (so you can update your databases). This ensures that your mail is being delivered to thecorrect address the first time, and reduces your undeliverable mail costs.
FranklinForward ACS
Tired of the costs and hassles associated with returned mail? FranklinForward ACS (Address Change Service) is our new, USPS-approved address change service. ACS can dramatically reduce your returned mail costs, eliminating physical returned mail pieces and replacing them with electronic change-of-address (COA) and non-delivery notifications. We can implement FranklinForward ACS for some or all of your mailings, and present these electronic notifications in our client portal for easy viewing/downloading.
Address Resolution Service
Some portion of your mailing address will not Zip+4-certify – and for those that don’t, they may get returned as undeliverable, or if they’re delivered it will likely take much longer than a Zip+4 record (not the best customer experience!) ARS (Address Resolution Service) takes your non-Zip+4 addresses and uses best-in-class database resources from Experian to correct approximately 40 to 50% of them, filling in missing or incorrect information like apartment/suite numbers and directionals (N/S/E/W). This will get more of your mail to your recipients faster, and reduce your undeliverable mail – creating a better customer experience and reducing waste.
Drop Shipping
If your mailing is geographically concentrated in one or more cities/counties/states, and are mailing using Standard Mail, you can utilize Drop Shipping to reduce your postage costs. Print and sort your mail based on these geographic concentrations, and then ship the concentrated mail directly to the regional NDC (Network Distribution Center) or Sectional Center Facility (SCF) for those locations. Because we have bypassed much of the mailing process by shipping the mail directly to these locations, you receive an “entry” postage discount for all those mailpieces.
Mailing Process Drop Shipping
