Move Update: Implications for Bulk Mailings
Starting on Nov. 23, 2008, the postal service put into effect a requirement that all automated presorted mailings follow guidelines to incorporate recent address changes. The move is meant to avoid the circulation of massive amounts of undeliverable mail which tends to clog the postal system. The postal service offers several options for customers to become compliant with these requirements and receive automation discounts on their mailings. Some of these include:
- Ancillary Service Endorsements (Such as “Address Service Requested”) which may charge you a fee for returning mail back to you
- Adding “Or Current Resident” on each label, which makes the piece less personal and does not inform you if your intended contact has moved
- NCOA Link Processing, which matches address changes against the national database and enables you to correct your own data with updated addresses
At Metro, our certified software offers NCOA Link Processing at reasonable rates. A processed list (or subsets of it) can be used for up to 95 days. As a cost-saving measure, we return a list of changed addresses back to the customer so the customer’s internal database can be updated. The customer can then send us new sublists from this updated database for 95 days after processing before recertification is needed.
A summary of Move Update can be found here.
A discussion of the NCOA Link process can be found here.
Certain database format requirements must be met in order for your list to process through NCOA Link. Please contact us at Metro to learn how our NCOA Link Processing can make you automation compliant and also help keep your databases current.