Why is My List Bad?
We know that the USPS will start, at some point, charging mailers a penalty for bad addresses. We know the penalty is .07 each. No, not for just the bad addresses, but they can charge .07 each for the entire mailing, if the mailing has a certain percentage of bad addresses. The USPS keeps changing the date for the penalties, so I won’t go into that.
The volume of Undeliverable As Addresses (UAA) in the United States is 9.7 billion per year. The following is some of the reasons:
- 75.8% is move related
- 5.2 % is for missing or incorrect apartment or suite numbers
- 0.1% is for missing or incorrect directionals
- 0.8% is for rural or highway contract box numbers
- 4.4% is for missing or incorrect street name or number
- 0.13% is for missing or incorrect city, state or zip
- 13.6% is for other reasons such as missing recipient, illegible handwritten address, deceased, unclaimed, or no mail receptacle.
At Burns we work for a lot of nonprofit organizations and they use volunteers to input their data. As you can imagine, some of their mailing lists are a mess. As the old saying goes “garbage in, garbage out.” When the penalty for UAA is charged by the USPS there will be a lot of mailers reaching into their pockets to pay the penalties if they have not cleaned up their list. Most mailing companies offer NCOAlink updates for nominal fees. At Burns Mailing & Printing, Inc. we offer free NCOAlink updates to our nonprofit customers, who print and mail with us.
