NCOA - National Change of Address
And
ACS - Address Change Service

NCOA and ACS Services Ensure Mailing List Delivery

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Where are my customers?

The labels are printed and at the letter shop, the mailing is going out on time, and hey, you're even going to track the results on Excel. You're on top of it - or are you? You've spent lots of time and preparation to get this mailing out your door but will it all arrive? The USPS says that as much as 35% of all the third class mail sent never arrives. Most of this is due to inaccurate addressing or shoddy data entry. The rest is not keeping up with the constantly shifting pattern of moves and address changes.

Statistics indicate that about 10% to 15% of the national population change location every year. If you factor in anomalies such as the 1993 mid-western floods or Hurricane Katrina, local area changes can be significantly greater. Businesses are often volatile within a changing financial environment, and regional economies can be especially troublesome. For example, more and more businesses are escaping California's crippled and badly mismanaged economy, going to more inviting areas like Utah, Texas or Nevada. The fact that these states welcome such refugee companies' attendant revenues with open arms (offering several financial and tax incentives as well) has had a tremendous impact on the accuracy of California businesses mailing lists for the last two or three years. Lists that were typically 93% deliverable, in many cases, dropped to an ineffective 75% to 80% reliability factor. It's equally difficult to keep up with new movers into financially attractive areas, due to the uncharacteristically increased incoming rates of flow. Trying to track these migrations can be an expensive "Nightmare on Mail Street." Therefore, for serious mailers, keeping their list clean, accurate and current is a major concern.

Typically, mailing list management is the choreography of patterns. If you've got that down, the technical aspects can be easily assimilated in a fairly short time. If this idea isn't the basis for every decision you make about your mailing list, you will continually be having surprises; and surprises = problems.

One of the most important operations in list maintenance is keeping addressing accurate on the one hand, while correctly matched with the current recipient on the other. These are two distinctly separate processes. Usually done in two stages, it makes sense to begin by insuring that the addresses themselves are clean (correct; standardized and therefore, deliverable).

Keeping Your Mailing List Cleaned

Cleaning and verifying deliverability simply requires strategy and good software. The first order of business is to regularly encode your list to CASS (Coding Accuracy Support System) standards. There are many fine CASS certified software products available which will do this at a reasonable cost. You will need a CD ROM since the USPS database against which your list will be matched is too large to make any other PC magnetic media practical, available or affordable.

For those of you who are still new to this, here is what this software does for you: It verifies and, when possible, corrects the 5-digit ZIP code in each record. It will standardize the address by spelling the street name correctly, properly abbreviating directionals (North West to NW), street designators (Avenue to Ave or Boulevard to Blvd) while removing any illegal punctuation (periods, commas, etc.). Finally, it will add the 4-digit ZIP+4 extension onto the basic 5-digit ZIP code, optionally add the delivery point Barcode number (2 digits - 3 digits with the checksum number) and implant the correct carrier route and its associated sequence information into each record. If an address is correct, the necessary coding information is simply added or updated. If the address is incorrectly written, but recognizable, it will be corrected as well. If the software cannot reach a definite conclusion, it will bypass that record, typically leaving an optional error code indicating what the problem is. In essence, those records that can be ZIP+4 encoded are deliverable - those that cannot, may not be. (Don't discard those yet as they still may be rescued.)

If your list is very small, or you only mail occasionally, you may wish to take advantage of the USPS's offer to code your list at no charge. Note that you will have to output your file to a USPS-defined ASCII fixed field file format (the Postal Service will provide you with the required specifications). While individual offices are often nice enough to update your list more than once, the USPS really only offers to do this one time. Don't expect them to keep your list updated on a continual basis; it's your list, it’s your responsibility.

There are also some programs which will allow you to call in to your local Post Office and code your list over a modem but, because it's a very slow process, this is really only practical for smaller lists. There are several Web services that will either code you list and send it back, as well as some that will let you code your list directly online.

If you take your list seriously, it's probably better to bite the bullet and get the right software or utilize a qualified service bureau.

How clean is clean? If your list doesn't achieve at least a 90-93% coding rate, then it needs work. Here's a guideline:

98%-100% Excellent
94-97% Very Good
90-93% Good
80-89% Needs Work
70-79% Needs Work!
60-69% Danger! Danger!
0-59% Telemarket Instead

How often is regularly? The USPS still hasn't come up with a definitive periodicity for updating ZIP+4's, though they strongly suggest at least once a year. If you are able to take advantage of carrier route rates, the answer is clearer - your list must be updated (using the current edition of the USPS National Database) every two months, since carrier routes change so often. My suggestion (and personal practice) is to update a list every two months, or anytime a significant change to the list occurs. You should re-code, for instance, after new records have been added or when a lot of address changes have been made. It's simple and keeps your database trim. Incidentally, always code before initiating a search for duplicate records; the address standardization alone will help you find a lot more.

Are you Still There? How Would I Know?

Now that you know most of your mailing list contains deliverable addresses, the next issue is this: is the intended recipient of your mailing piece still at that address? This is an entirely separate issue. Before choosing the best solution to this problem, here are some things that should be considered:

Standard Class bulk mail sent to either an incorrect or non-existent address is thrown in the trash. It will also end up being discarded if the mailing piece is addressed to a non-existent recipient, or one who is no longer at that address. Note that you will not be told how many of your pieces ended up in the dumpster. This is USPS regulation procedure and it's entirely fair. Your bulk mail discounts are based on the premise that your addressing is accurate and your codes are up to date. Any mail, which ends up being thrown away, is strictly your fault.

If You’re Not Going To Deliver It, At Least Send It Back…

If you are sending enormous quantities of mail, saturating a market area (sending a coupon offer to every resident in the zip code, for instance), a simple "OR CURRENT RESIDENT" under the assumed recipient's name will insure that whoever is at that address will receive your mailer. In saturation situations, this is usually good enough. Experienced list managers often dispense with a resident name altogether. It seems to strike people better to simply be the "current resident" than getting someone else's mail.

If, however, you are like most businesses, the "Or Current Resident" can work against you, by seemingly staying in contact with your customers, as you send mail to nowhere, while losing track of customers who have moved. The USPS offers some great services to help you in this.

The first is through using the "Change Service Requested" or the "Address Service Requested" endorsements so commonly seen on bulk mail pieces.

When someone moves, and wants to receive mail at their new address, they will usually fill out a Change of Address Order (USPS form 3575) and file it with the post office. If no form 3575 has been filed and it is discovered that the recipient is no longer receiving mail at a particular address, an action is usually filed by the Postal carrier. From that point on, for a period of 18 months, any third-class mail is either returned to the sender or forwarded on to the recipient at their new address (and a notice of change returned to sender), as long as the sender requests it by placing one of the above messages on the mailing piece. It's important to note that the USPS has specific requirements regarding the phrasing and placement of these endorsements - if you aren't clear on them, contact your local Post Office or refer to the DMM (Domestic Mail Manual) for the particulars.

If you include the endorsement, "Change Service Requested" on your mail, you will get back any address changes, FOE's (Forwarding Order Expired), MLNA's (Moved Left No Address) or NIXIES (undeliverables) with a yellow correction label on the front. You will pay return postage of $.75 (one ounce or less; in certain situations, more if heavier) each. According to the DMM, the pieces which weigh one ounce or less will be returned and those which weigh over on ounce will be sent back on an "Address Change Notification" card (form number 3547). Most of the returns that I process for clients still consist of the actual mailing pieces - regardless of the weight - although a few 3547's, occasional photocopies or just the front page (usually newsletters) torn directly from the piece also turn up from time to time.

Returned addresses usually fall into one of three categories:

The address on the mailer is no longer correct - here (on the yellow label) is the new one.

"FORWARDING ORDER EXPIRED" (FOE) meaning that even though the intended recipient has filed change of address paperwork, the USPS's proscribed time of notifying mailers of the new address or forwarding the piece has passed.

"Nixies" are undeliverable for any number of reasons; the recipient moved leaving no forwarding address (MLNA), the address was not entered correctly and there is no such address, the recipient is unknown at that address, etc.

You can now correct your list by deleting the nixies, updating the changed addresses and trying to figure out what the @#!&%#@!! to do with the FOE's. If your list is large enough, or it's a prospecting list only, you might just delete those as well. If not, then you should probably tag them as currently undeliverable so that they can later be run through NCOA (National Change Of Address - more on NCOA later).

Any forwardables will receive your next mailing piece and the nixies won't be sent out again at all. The only downside is that forwardables won't receive anything until your next mailing.

This is why the other endorsement "Address Service Requested" is sometimes used. By using this endorsement, any forwardable mail is now sent on to the intended person(s) at the new address and correction notice is sent back to you (as are the nixies). At this point, the decision which to use is strictly a numbers game. If you choose to pay for all of the forwarding notices at the standard rate ($.75 ea.), then the forwarding postage is free (if the recipient still lives in the original local; by weight if out of the area). You can do it the other way around, but there isn't much sense in that, as the recipient will then have to pay the additional postage. There is a difference in how the nixies are handled, though. In order to balance out the additional cost of forwarding your other mailing pieces, the USPS returns your original nixies at a weighted postage amount rather than at the piece rate. This can end up being a lot more expensive for you.

If what you are sending is of enough importance, and if your list is current, forwarding may be the option for you. Here is an example of important: a client who has a list of 45,000 but only sends to small (5,000 piece) regions throughout the year. Some of these regions are mailed more often than others based on the best past responses to his seminar series offer. Since he is asking for recipients to sign up for seminars at about $495.00 per attendee, and because he may not get out there again for six months to a year, getting a flyer to every potential attendee is of the utmost importance. Even two more commitments to attend will pay for almost half of the mailing itself.

Because address correction can be a slow and costly process when done manually, the Postal Service offers an automated alternative called ACS (Address Change Service). This option is really cool. This is how it works:

All the above parameters of address forwarding and/or address correction still basically pertain, but now you can do all your corrections electronically. With the corrections and nixies supplied on 9-track tape or disk, updating your list reduces update time by about 90%. And if that isn't enough for you, here's the real kicker: The automated ACS rate is only $.21 per return; that's a savings of about 72%!

First you must apply to the ACS for an ACS Participant Code (an account number consisting of 7 alpha characters) that will be assigned to you or your client. This number must appear on all your labels so that corrections can be routed and invoiced to the company or individual on the account. The only billing exceptions are any returned nixies (under the "Address Service Requested" endorsement), which are paid for at the time of delivery (as in the paper system). Incidentally, you can have the corrections file sent to one location (i.e. a service bureau) and the invoice sent to another (a client).

After your account has been approved and a Participant Code assigned, you can submit an optional "Keyline Identifier" code (a unique match code generated from data in each record), which will also appear on your labels. This Keyline is typically used to update address information in the record from which it was generated.

This automation service is not new; in fact, it's used by most of the really large mailers in the US for quite some time. If your mailings are moderately sized, you can still save a lot of postage and update expense; but there are no free lunches on Wall Street.

Setting up labels for the ACS program can be tricky. The Participant Code must go on the first line of the label. If there is an Optional Endorsement Line (OEL) on that same line, they must be integrated. That means that, "**************** 5-DIG 87110" would now look like, "#BYOBOFN ******* 5-DIG 87110". A pound sign (#) must precede the account number and, if there is anything else on the same line, a space must immediately follow.

Without some programming skill or software designed for this purpose generating a keyline can be daunting. Requirements state that it can be no shorter than 4 characters and no longer than 16 (including a checksum digit). This code must be preceded and followed by a pound sign and may contain embedded spaces for readability (yours - not theirs). Embedded spaces and pound signs are not counted toward the 16-character length and are not returned as part of the ACS record. This part's not so hard.

The complicated part is generating the keyline's checksum digit. The formula is too involved to go into here, but it centers around either using numeric characters directly from your records (either compiled like a match code or a straight id number - my choice) or alpha characters which have been converted to numbers through part of the keyline formula. Keyline codes must all be the same length (if your using numeric characters only, pad the first positions in shorter keylines with 0's). Beginning and ending pound sign delimiters are also required. There are some other technicalities that can best be understood through ordering The ACS Technical Guide. By the way, the ACS's automated program overview, complete with examples, requirements and application form can be found in Postal Publication # 8, Address Change Service. You should have both close at hand.

Before your first time using the automated ACS service, the ACS office will have you submit a small run of ACS-ready labels with to verify their compliance with USPS regulations. My feeling is, even if you have to call a consultant to help you set it up, do it. It's well worth it, and will continue to be over and over again.

Is You’re List a Little “Long In The Tooth?”

There are still some lapses in the system, however. Since a forwarding order is active for 18 months, it would follow, that after several quarterly mailings, to your full list, you would not get any FOE's. My experience, however, is that I still get some back every time I work with my clients' lists. The ACS isn't perfect, and even though it's system is carefully thought out, implementing it is a slow process of reorganizing postal working patterns right down to the carrier level. In other words, expect some paper FOE's back from most of your mailings - no matter how frequent they are.

If your list hasn’t been updated for a couple of years, you can bring it up to speed with the help of another USPS service: NCOA. The USPS describes NCOA as: "...an address change process that compares mailing lists with information from over 100 million address change cards filed by postal customers over the past three years. Address change information is provided for mailing list records that match with information from the address cards."

The daily change of address (COA) information is telecommunicated From Computer Forwarding System sites across the US to the USPS National Address Information Center (NAIC) in Memphis - home of CASS, ACS, NCOA and others.

The NAIC then consolidates this information and puts it on CD ROM. The address information is standardized against the ZIP+4 code database. The now standardized COA file is transmitted to private companies who are operating under a licensing agreement with the US Postal Service. These licensees, using USPS-approved software to process your mailing list(s) and make address corrections, standardize your addresses and add ZIP+4's to your records.

Every two weeks NCOA licensees receive as much as 1 million COA updates. These include address changes and deletions. This is to keep mailing list updates as current as possible. The licensees receive ZIP+4 code update files once a month. The NCOA database only goes back 48 months. Every two weeks, when the USPS contractors get their new data, the oldest two weeks of information are dropped from the file. This means that any addresses more than four years old will not be updated because they will not be able to be matched.

Typically, most of these licensees process huge lists, and when processing in bulk, the prices can be pretty reasonable. There is also a presupposition that your list is in the correct record format and layout, that you want your updated information to be in upper case and (in most cases) the file is sent over the Internet.

Prices range from $2.95 to 4.95 per thousand records with a minimum charge of $45.00 to $100.00. The variance in pricing is based on turn around time, quality of file format, degree of data scrubbing necessary to optimize a file for NCOA processing, etc.

Why NCOA when you’re using the ACS, in one form or another, already? There are many reasons. The first situation in which NCOA is a smart move is at the time you're first starting to use the ACS's correction services. If you haven't mailed to your list in quite awhile or haven't been requesting address corrections for your last several mailings - or any of your mailings - then NCOA is imperative. Starting out without an NCOA cleanup would mean a very expensive return the first few mailings (the first one is the biggest, of course, but it takes about three regular mailings to determine predictable numbers of returns). Remember those FOE's? Since NCOA goes back 4 years - 30 months further back than ACS records - many records can be recovered from NCOA which could not from ACS processing. Also, if you were to NCOA your list regularly at six month or one-year intervals, your ZIP+4 and address standardization would automatically be updated as well.

Put Your List on a Fitness Program

In general, these are the cyclical steps that will keep your list clean:

A mailing has gone out. The list was current and properly coded, the data went out to the lettershop on time and some sales have even been generated.

As manual (bad, bad, no biscuit.) or electronic (good doggy!) returns from the ACS are collected and stored for the next mailing’s preprocessing.

Your data entry continues while the next mailing date approaches and, perhaps, some additional new records have been imported from another list.

Now that mailing time is approaching, it's time to either manually or electronically use the ACS returns (or COA file) to update your list.

Address changes are changed, FOE's are either deleted or (better) marked as unmailable until NCOA has had a crack at them, and nixies are removed.

Time to standardize and code your list; this is where CASS Certified (aka Zip+4 coding) comes in.

Now that your list has had all the new additions, corrections and deletions integrated into it and the addresses have been CASS standardized and coded, it's time to take out the duplicate records. Duplication removal is a science unto itself; how people approach it varies - but whatever your solution to this ongoing problem, this is the point at which it should take place.

You're ready to prepare your next mailing.

The cycle begins again: A mailing has gone out. The list was current and properly coded; the labels went out to...

Once a year (twice is even better) send your list off to be matched against NCOA and pick up any changes you can. Those previously marked FOE's will either be updated or found to be nixies (or may not change tat all). Some records, which were thought to be good, will turn out to be nixies. Now you can delete any records that are either nixies or FOE’s, which couldn't be updated.

It really is that simple. If you consistently follow this (or a similar) procedure, you will be pleasantly surprised at how well your list will come together. You will find that projection and tracking figures finally jibe with your company’s delivery and response realities.

Now you are what professionals call a mailer, and your motto can now be: "Hey, don't ever change (but if you do... We Know Where You Are!)"