Last fall, that’s where I met Bob Eide, an affable direct mail specialist who has been with the postal service since 1973. When the Direct Marketing Association holds its annual convention, the USPS sets up a large stand to pitch the service in a giant hall alongside the country’s biggest data brokers. The Postal Service lost nearly $16 billion in fiscal year 2012, then another $3.1 billion in the first half of fiscal 2013. " This amount does not include the savings to the mailing industry for wasted postage, production costs, and lost customers." "The ability to update customer address information through NCOALink has been previously estimated to save the USPS and the postal rate payer in excess of $1 billion annually," he said, referring to what they call undeliverable-as-addressed mail. But the program results in big savings by avoiding additional cost of forwarding mail. The Postal Service makes about $8 million a year licensing its change of address data, according to James Wilson, the USPS manager of address management. The post office also sells cheaper licenses with 18 months of data. “Mailers submit their address lists directly to these commercial data processors who update the information and return to the mailer.”Ī full license with four years of data costs $190,000. “Either weekly or monthly we distribute an updated file of change-of-address data to the licensed companies,” Betts said. Today they license to about 500 companies, he said. That change allowed the postal service to distribute the address changes more widely. After complaints about privacy violations, they reformatted the data to assure only those with the former address could obtain the new information, according to spokesman Roy Betts. Until 2002, the USPS licensed to just 22 companies. The Postal Service set up its current National Change of Address program, sometimes abbreviated as NCOA, in 1986.
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