Keeping Your Stamps.com Address Book Current

October 4th, 2016 Comments off

SDC Blog Address BookBefore you send direct mail pieces to your customers, take a moment to think about your address data. Is all your contact information accurate and up-to-date?

Here are a few tips to help maintain data integrity when it comes to your address book:

1. Check for deliverability.Make sure addresses are deliverable before you manually enter or import them into your address book. Complete an audit of your database every year and include salutation information to understand who your customers are and target them better.

2. Remove duplicate addresses.You don’t want to send the same mail piece to the same address several times. Not only is it a waste of money and resources, but also your customers are less likely to be excited to receive the same communication several times.

3. Use ancillary endorsements on First-Class Mail®. This practice will tremendously help your mailing operations and save your business a lot of money in the long run. This free service (“Address Service Requested” is included on your mail piece) lets you know if the recipient has moved and gives you the opportunity to resend your message to the correct address.

Easily Maintain Your Address Book in Stamps.com 
Stamps.com has a built-in Address Book that enables you to store and manage customer addresses. You can manually add addresses or import them into Stamps.com from an address book like Act, QuickBooks or Outlook. All addresses will pass through the USPS Address Matching System, ensuring that your addresses are deliverable. Stamps.com also gives you the option of sorting through addresses in your address book so you can only choose to print postage for a certain group of customers depending on your business need. Stamps.com also has a useful “Group” feature that allows you to segment your customers based on their behavior. For example, you can send a thank you note or postcard to all customers who purchased your product or products in a certain month.

How to Lower Mailing Costs with Address Cleansing

September 24th, 2014 2 comments

Return_to_senderTimely and accurate mail delivery is vital to businesses everywhere. When your customers’ addresses contain typos, incorrect ZIP codes or non-standard state abbreviations, delivery rates can decline, time in transit can increase, and often times postage is wasted when mail is returned as undeliverable.  In addition to the money spent on returned postage, deliverability issues can have a huge negative impact on customer service.

But when you’ve got thousands of addresses in your customer database, it’s nearly impossible to manually ensure that each and every one of them is correct and formatted to the USPS’s preferred specifications.  This is where address cleansing software comes into play.

What Is Address Cleansing?

Address cleansing is accomplished by software that compares your addresses to addresses in the USPS database to help you discover any errors or inconsistencies regarding spelling, ZIP codes, or state abbreviations.  Often, the cleansing software will suggest an alternative, much like a spell checker.  Occasionally, the address will be incomprehensible; while this may sound like a bad thing, it is better to catch these mistakes before wasting postage on them.  Here is an example of an address that contains a couple of misspellings, an improper abbreviation and an incorrect ZIP code, as well as some missing information about the street:

John Smith
11950 Salam Dr
Granada Hils, CA 91333

Once the address is cleansed according to the USPS’s standards by fixing the street name, city, and zip, the address becomes:

John Smith
11950 Salem Dr
Granada Hills CA 91344-2347

Benefits of Address Cleansing

Here are some of the benefits that can result from cleansing your addresses:

  • Eliminate postage costs for items that cannot be delivered
  • Accelerate the sorting and routing of your mail so that it is delivered faster
  • Improve response rates to direct mail campaigns
  • When sending invoices, collect customer payments faster
  • Increase customer satisfaction through faster delivery

Stamps.com Automatically Cleanses Your Addresses

When you use Stamps.com for your mailing and shipping needs, you don’t need to worry about address cleansing; Stamps.com automatically does it for you! Stamps.com periodically syncs with the USPS Address Matching Service Database to make sure that your customers’ addresses are complete, state abbreviations are standard, and ZIP codes are up to date.  For no extra charge, Stamps.com cleanses every address on your mailing list before printing labels or postage, and you can rest easy knowing that your mail will be delivered quickly, correctly, and without unnecessary expense.

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