Data-Mail Helps Major Financial Institution Save Millions.

A major financial institution has a regular twice-monthly mailing of between 6 million and 9 million pieces, which it sends as First Class Mail. The undeliverable mail was being returned to them where it was securely destroyed, but the company was not capturing any information from the returned mail because they felt it was cost prohibitive. This lack of return mail information left the company with no visibility into potential savings opportunities or address accuracy.

Solution: Data-Mail suggested using its WebTrack ACS solution to electronically capture Undeliverable as Addressed (UAA) information.

– When this solution was implemented, our customer suppressed more than 150,000 records from their first month’s mailing from all subsequent mailings. Without the data showing why these pieces were undeliverable, the company would have kept mailing to these records. These records would have been mailed 11 more times over the next 12 months at 36¢ for postage and 8¢ for production. The company saved approximately $500,000 over the next 12 months by suppressing this single population of UAA mail.

– Further, the company now had a sense of its true response rate. For example, if you mailed 100 pieces and got one response, you would assume a 1% response rate. But if in reality 25 pieces were not delivered, your response rate was actually 1.33%. This information is extremely valuable to measuring the true success of the campaign.

-In addition, the information our customer now receives about their mailings has helped them convert large first class mailings to standard class, saving millions of dollars each year.

Data-Mail’s WebTrack service provided through Intelisent transformed this mailer’s direct mail strategy by using the Intelligent Mail Barcode (IMb), along with OneCode CONFIRM and OneCode ACS. OneCode Confirm and OneCode ACS are options that mailers can utilize with the IMb without cluttering up the envelope with additional tracking numbers.

OneCode ACS is not your father’s ACS (Address Change Service). Many companies shied away from ACS because it required two additional lines of characters, numbers, and symbols above the name and address block, the key code and the subscriber ID. This clunky and impersonal information made ACS a non-starter for many companies. With the Intelligent Mail Barcode, OneCode ACS information is embedded in the barcode. Mailers can turn it on and turn it off with no impact to the look and feel of the mail piece. It is truly an “on demand” function that a mailer can use to measure service performance and undeliverables.

The opportunities for cost savings and efficiency with OneCode ACS are enormous.