May 2005

Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind, Into The Dumpster

No endorsement In all cases: Piece disposed of by USPS.

That's a direct quote from the Domestic Mail Manual under the heading of USPS Treatment of UAA Pieces. What exactly does this mean? Let's start with the acronym UAA. Undeliverable As Addresses describes mail with some error or omission in its address that prevents it from being delivered. Standard Mail with no appropriate ancillary endorsement (the No endorsement in the quote above) will not be forwarded so undeliverable really means undeliverable.

It is estimated that 23% of all mail is undeliverable. The handling, and returning or disposing of this mail is costing the post office nearly $2 billion each year. Standard mail is about half of the estimated 200 billion pieces of mail handled by the USPS each year. Using those numbers we can estimate that Undeliverable Standard Mail amounts to 23 billion pieces of mail each year.

Yet most mailers pretend it's not happening to them. How could you consciously pay for a mailing knowing that 10, 15, or even 20% had no chance of getting to a mailbox?

If you mail Standard Mail, there are some things you can do to keep your mail out of the USPS dumpster:

UAA Standard Mail is caused by bad addresses. You can easily identify a bad address. It is the one that cannot be ZIP+4 encoded. That is, the address is incomplete or incorrect enough that it's ZIP+4 (the last 4 digits that make up a 9-digit ZIP Code) cannot be identified by your list processing software.

Delete the bad addresses if you can. They're going directly to the trash anyway. If bad addresses must be mailed to, remove them from the Standard Mailing and mail them first class. You'll pay higher postage for those but they have a much greater chance of actually being delivered. And you are paying for delivery. Any First Class pieces that get returned to you can be used to update your mailing list and reduce the number of bad addresses in the next mailing.

Your Worst Mailing Experience

A new web site is offering a brand new DVD Player to the person with the worst experience. If you have ever had little or no response from a mailing, or paid too much postage, or received poor service from your lettershop, your experience can actually pay off.

MyBadMail.com is collecting stories from advertisers of their worst mailing episodes. If your mail tale is judged the worst, you will win a DVD Player.

To enter, go to http://www.MyBadMail.com. You can enter from the email link (story@mybadmail.com, mailto:story@mybadmail.com) or by calling the provided toll-free phone number.