Justin Jackson

Improving Deliverability

To make one to one marketing work marketers have to use all the options available to improve deliverability and get the message to their consumers. 

The Postal Service offers a broad range of address cleansing services, there are many non exclusive providers of the National Change of Address service.  This service will soon become a requirement for mailers on a quarterly basis.  Another beneficial service utilizes the Delivery Sequence File.  By matching to all US addresses in DSF processing questionable addresses can be indentified and removed.  Many codes within DSF can help further examine the quality of the address data.  But these services are available from many sources, almost every provider offers them.  Getting the edge on your competition requires going beyond these services.

Several proprietary change of address services are offered by InfoUSA, Cognitive Data, Frontline Data or Epsilon.  They utilize consumer compilation files that receive address changes that may not be recorded at the USPS.  Market studies report that 35% of the US Population does not report changes to the USPS.  The USPS also defines matching criteria and many moves can be missed as a result.  Finally, the Proprietary Change of Address services go back farther than just the 48 months offered by the USPS.

Proprietary change of address services are created when multiple sources for the consumer files report a “new” address.  The feeds to most of the national consumer files are extensive; literally thousands of different sources create the marketing intelligence available from the consumer files.  The InfoUSA file contains over 250 million individuals and over 130 million households.   The average match rate when matching this service is 1%-2% depending on the provider.  With the lifetime value of a customer in jeopardy, the cost of running a proprietary change of address service is easy to justify.

Some proprietary services also track changes of the last name or maintain variants of the first name.  This is particularly helpful with married/maiden name occurrences and nicknames or shortened spellings; anything that can throw off the matching logic of a program can cause issues, even when they are obvious to the naked eye.  Taking the time and effort to test and evaluate these services and find the best blend for scheduling them is not without it’s challenges, but following best practices wins out in the end every time.

Article Tags: Proprietary Change, Address Services

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