Search and post jobs for the Multichannel Merchant. Including jobs for brand & agency marketers, e-commerce, catalog marketers, ops & fulfillment, direct marketing and more.
And run your old or inactive records
through the Postal Service's Locatable Address Conversion System
(LACS), a DPV tool that helps determine if the business still exists
but with a different address.
Or
you can use an outside source to verify the address — a good idea
especially for b-to-b mailers. “If a business moves, it's still going
to want to get its mail,” Stangle says.
Wine
merchant Geerlings & Wade segments the non-compliant names by
recency, frequency, and monetary value, says director of consumer
marketing Jake Hall. The ones that top breakeven, including the postage
penalty, continue being mailed.
“For
our best customers, we will go to increasingly expensive means to
correct the address, like e-mail them, then follow up with a phone
call, and then maybe send a postcard,” Hall explains.
Geerlings & Wade also tests lesser segments of non-qualified addresses to track any differences in response.
“In
the past, I've seen non-zip+4 addresses perform better than so-called
‘good’ addresses, simply because they don't suffer the same mailbox
glut as others,” Hall adds.
Yapuncich
agrees with Hall. If all catalogers drop non-qualified addresses, few
catalogs will reach rural areas where addresses may still include
“rural route” and not even be compliant with LACS.
“If
merchants all decide they aren't going to spend extra to mail to a
non-qualified address, that means a lot of households in middle America
won't be getting catalogs,” Yapuncich says. “You may get a better
response if you mail to those addresses because no one else is reaching
them. You may have to pay a premium to mail them, but you probably
won't have a lot of competition.”
Only
60% of the households that move fill out a change of address form with
the USPS. But every mover will go to their regular mailers to make sure
they will still receive “wanted” mail, Stangle says.
Thus,
he recommends segmenting non-compliant addresses and running a
merge/purge against magazine subscription lists, utility bills and
warranty cards.
Sometimes
it's as simple as going to an online directory like whitepages.com or
LinkedIn to correct respective b-to-c and b-to-b addresses. Better yet,
if the phone number is included in the data, give the customer a call
and ask if the address is correct.
But
there's another problem as well: Not all bad addresses are caused by a
business or household move, or an address that was updated by LACS.
Sometimes they are due to simple data entry errors that put things out
of whack.
Misspellings
can make it through CASS, but Stangle says they are easy to fix.
Sometimes it just takes some proofreading to correct the spelling of
“Maiin St.” At other times, you may have to cross-check with another
list to see if Bobby Jones lives at 101 or 103 Main St.
With
that in mind, mailers such as Geerlings & Wade are investing in
address verification software that will assist with corrections while
the customer is still on the phone.
The
USPS DPV database is loaded into the call-center software. So if an
address is being entered incorrectly, it will be flagged. Then the
operator can ask for verification.
