Russell Thomas Russell Thomas
0 Comments February 21, 2012

Cut Your Mail Cost by Millions While Increasing Your Mail Deliverability Rate

Suppress Returned Mail for a Fraction of the Cost of a Mail Piece

If you are responsible for mailings at your company, you know the trend: mail volume continues to drop dramatically. This chart from the Courier Express and Postal Observer shows the mail volume trend:

Certainly email and social media have driven budgets away from direct mail, but it is still a very powerful method of reaching customers and prospects, especially if managed wisely.

The key learning from working with dozens of clients is to drive undeliverable records out of your mail stream as soon as possible.

Let’s do some quick math:

  • Pieces Mailed per Month: 3,000,000 every month at $1.00 per piece, including postage (your mileage may vary).
  • Mail Cost: $3,000,000 per month.
  • Returned Mail Rate: 3% are returned to you by the USPS, most with no forwarding address (assumes a clean file that has undergone National Change of Address processing).
  • Pieces Returned per Month: 90,000 pieces are returned (3% return rate) at $1.00 each, so you just handed the USPS $90,000 that you could have used for other programs.
  • Annual Direct Mail Waste: If you mail that file 12 times per year, that’s $1,080,000 spent on undelivered direct mail.

What can you do to reduce your direct mail budget spent on repeated mailings to undeliverable records?
MetaSource has developed a returned mail suppression process that will work for any company with a significant volume of mail.

  1. MetaSource will setup a mailing address to which all of your company’s returned mail will be sent.
  2. MetaSource will pick-up that mail each day and capture the customer number or address information you need to suppress those records from future mailings.
  3. For the small percentage of records with a change of address label, MetaSource will also capture the new address so that you can update your database.
  4. If you can’t import that data from a file we send you, MetaSource will perform the suppressions directly into your system.
  5. Regardless of how it’s done, MetaSource will get those records out of your future mail streams.

There are many variables to the cost of this process, but it is always a small fraction of the cost of a single mail piece. Isn’t it time to bite the bullet and do something about saving millions in mail costs and increasing your deliverability rate?

I will happy to consult with you about the particulars of your program. Give me a call today at:

Russell Thomas | VP, BPO Services
55 Cedar Lake Rd, Denville, NJ 07834
office 973 400 9055 | mobile 973 714 2606
www.metasource.com | rthomas@metasource.com  

 

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