In June of 2015, we wrote on this blog about how ACS can reduce your Undeliverable As Addressed (UAA) Mail and, in the process, save you on return mail fees – currently $1.17 per piece. Click here to read that post: http://gofranklingo.com/blog/index.php/2015/06/15/how-to-eliminate-returned-mail/
A large number of our clients presently use the service and save thousands of dollars each month in return mail fees. At the same time, they can save even more money by updating their mail file regularly.
ACS records on our Client Portal will indicate when a mail piece has been flagged as Undeliverable and has been discarded by the USPS. Ideally those records should be downloaded and those customer accounts marked as Undeliverable in our clients’ databases, to eliminate them from future mailings. (Another option would be to develop a process to contact those customers via other methods – email, phone, etc – in an attempt to get updated address information.)
Suppose, for example, that you conducted a mailing last month that consisted of 200,000 mail pieces. 4% or 8,000 of them were Undeliverable. By using ACS, you saved yourself $9,360 in return mail fees. And by removing those bad addresses from your mailing list, you would not mail to them the following month. Assuming an all-in production and postage cost of $0.50 per piece, that’s another $4,000 in savings on EACH subsequent monthly mailing – for customers that were unlikely to receive the piece anyway!
One final point concerns opportunity cost. We provide our clients with updated address data when it is available. Updating your mailing list with that information will help get your offer to more potential responders more quickly. That directly affects your ROI via increased offer redemptions, sales activity, and event attendees, just to name a few.
If you would like to learn more about ACS, or best practices for integrating ACS into your mailing strategy, please contact us at info@gofranklingo.com or call us at (800) 375-0504.
