New Rates Set for May 14!

...PRC accepting comments...You can help!

As we told you in our special "Postal Horror" issues, the Postal Board of Governors had decided to accept the recommendations of the Postal Regulatory Commission and "adjust" postage rates effective May 14. The BOG did take exception to a few items in the recommendation, and asked the PRC to reconsider them. Specifically they had to do with flat-rate Priority Mail boxes, a nonmachinable surcharge on certain First Class letters, and the sadistic increase in Standard rate flats. While we don't have much of an opinion on the first two items, the lack of tall buildings in our market from which flats mailers can fling themselves to proper effect causes us to be concerned with the final item, the recommended flats rates.

Fortunately there may be something that can be done about these new rates, but we need your help. If the new rates will hurt your business, please contact the Postal Regulatory Commission and share your concerns. They will be accepting comments until April 14 and are particularly interested in the opinions of mail owners (you!), rather than smooth talking professional mailers (us). You can send letters to the following:

Postal Regulatory Commission
Regarding Order No. 8, Docket No. R2006-1
901 New York Avenue, NW
Suite 200
Washington, DC 20268-0001

From industry insiders we've spoken with, we believe that your comments may really make a difference this time. If you mail flat size mail, please give serious consideration to making your voice heard.

More on Address Quality - Oh Boy!

...Addresses don't buy stuff...people do!

Back in February, before we were interrupted by the postal rate case, we were talking about address quality...well, technically we were writing about it and hopefully you were reading about it. That notwithstanding...

We had covered how to get a good street address through CASS, DPV, AEC and, of course, AEC-II with DFK. Naturally you have since brought all of those initials into your address processing. What? You haven't? You may want to revisit those earlier issues. Undaunted, we will soldier on.

Having a good street address is a good thing. Your mail piece will arrive somewhere, and the Postal Service appreciates it. But if your prospect has moved on, your mailing effort may - and generally will - be wasted. Keeping up with the people on your list is the next step. Of course the best way to do this is to keep a line of communication open with your customers or members and have them send you their new addresses when they move. Failing that, there are a couple of tools that can help.

NCOA Link - Pre-mailing address corrections

NCOA stand for National Change Of Address. When a good citizen moves they turn in a change of address form with their new address. The Postal Service builds these changes into the NCOA database. We can match your list against this database and tell you who has moved along with their new address. This is a valuable service for consumer lists. It is less useful for business to business lists. Most folks are good sports enough to file a change of address when they...umm...leave a job. We suggest that most mailers match their house file against NCOA once a quarter.

OneCode ACS - Nabbing address changes on the fly

A new product, just becoming available, is ACS OneCode. With OneCode ACS you can identify forwarded mail while it is still in the mailstream and recieve address update information. This will generally be the most recent update data, and you can be confident that if the mail piece has been forwarded the new address is good. This service is only available for First-Class letters at this time, but will be available for all classes of mail in the next year or so. It is also only available to the most advanced mailers that use the Intelligent Mail Barcode, so it may be a while before you can use it. Wait! If you work with ProList you are already using the new IMB! In the coming weeks we'll be offering OneCode ACS service as well. Stay tuned for details.

Of course we'll have an extended lesson on address quality at our blockbuster seminar "Uber Postal Madness 2007" on May 2 in Washington DC. Please plan on attending - it's free. Just go to our website, www.prolist.com, to sign up!