The Cost of Undeliverable Mail

By Paul Johnson, President CMS – Complete Mailing Solutions

How Much Is It?

Have you stopped to consider the real financial impact of undeliverable mail?
We’ve blogged about how mail piece design can impact deliverability of your mail and provided guidelines that will help ensure your mail gets delivered. If you are like a lot of companies, once a mail piece is returned, you simply change the address and resend it – right? Just more paper and postage costs, that’s all – but is it?

Undeliverable as addressed (UAA) mail is a costly problem for both mailers and the Postal Service alike. In 2016 alone, nearly 6.6 billion mail pieces were undeliverable*. Mailers spend over $20 billion on UAA mail, while direct costs to the USPS is over $1.5 billion/year**.

If you think the only cost for undeliverable mail is reprinting and remailing costs, you’re in for a big surprise. There’s much more to the story than that. For mailers, there are both tangible and intangible costs related to undeliverable mail:

Tangible

• Statements and late notices, if applicable
• Labor to prepare mailings, research the correct address and regenerate and re-mail the communication
• Delayed payment of invoices and its impact on cash flow

Intangible

• Lost sales because the communication was never received or received too late to act upon.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) impact -damaged customer relationship and reduced goodwill from customers who are irate from not receiving correspondence in a timely manner and/or receiving late fees.

The bottom line: Companies can easily spend $25 or more per piece of returned mail. How can you determine your cost? The USPS Inspector General sited a simple way of determining this. Take the annual value of a customer and divide it by the customer’s expected response rate. For example, if a Customer is worth $600 annually and typically responds at a 10% rate, the cost of the UAA mail piece is $60 – a far cry from the cost to reprint and re-mail the original communication!

Improving Deliverability

One of the most significant factors impacting mail deliverability is address quality. With 18% of the population moving each year and 20% of businesses moving or failing, it is critical to keep addresses up-to-date to keep deliverability high. Address quality software can identify and update your customer file before your mail piece goes out the door

Need a solution to improve your mail deliverability? Click here for data quality options or call us at 303-761-0681