Bad addresses will keep important messages from being delivered to your customers through the mail. But address quality can affect other parts of your business too. Consistent address hygiene ensures organizations make decisions based on current and accurate information. Many of those cases have nothing to do with mailed documents.
A good example is dispatch. Organizations offering field services waste money sending service people to the wrong addresses while simultaneously upsetting customers that scheduled the service appointments. Customer inquiries about missing service people can set off an internal investigation that wastes resources and triggers a negative customer experience.
Going Paperless?
When companies push customers to paperless delivery, they tend to believe mailing addresses are no longer important. We know of a company that had always relied on a post-mailing method of address updates. When a customer moved, the USPS would provide the new address. When the company transitioned customers to email delivery, they unwittingly disrupted their address update process.
About 12% of the US population moves every year. After eliminating mailed communications for many of their customers, a significant number of addresses in this company’s customer database became obsolete. When they later needed to reach these people by mail to satisfy regulatory requirements, they had a big problem.
Strategic Plans and Personalization
Customer addresses come into play in corporate planning as well. Companies often allocate sales and service territories or make staffing decisions based on geographic customer density. Retail companies choose store sites based on where the customers live. Bad address data can lead to strategic missteps.
Besides delivery problems, inaccurate addresses can affect conversion rates on marketing campaigns – regardless of the channel in which they are delivered. An effective tactic for direct marketers, for instance, is including a variable map in marketing materials to direct each customer to their nearest branch or retail location. When marketing pieces contain directions to a distant location, retailers miss out on sales they might have made at a more convenient store location had they known the customers had moved.
Help is Available
Fortunately, address data can be fixed. Tools like the Coding Accuracy Support System (CASS) allow companies like Shelton Connect to analyze customer databases and correct or flag insufficient addresses. Authorized to access the National Change of Address database from the Postal Service, we can identify people who have moved and supply their current addresses to our clients. Depending on the needs of our clients we can use other tools and resources to further refine customer address data. We can add apartment numbers, flag vacant properties, separate business from residential addresses, or trim records of deceased individuals from client mailing lists.
Most companies never compute the cost of bad address data on their businesses. The amounts can be substantial. Sophisticated tools in the hands of mailing professionals can eliminate waste and restore corporate data to a state of reliability. If you suspect your address quality could be better, call us!