Postal Service Counting on You to Make Mistakes

Recently, I read an article by Dave Lewis of PROLIST about the USPS Move Update instituting an important change. Mailing lists have been required to be kept up-to-date but the USPS tolerated a 30% error rate. Effect October 2014, that tolerance rate is being dropped to .08%! If a mailer doesn’t meet this updated standard, they will pay a penalty to the Postal Service.

Ahhhh…a revenue stream for the USPS.

While we all want the USPS to survive, hefty fees will hopefully be the road less traveled! For Full Service Intelligent Mail, Lewis said there are steps that can be taken to avoid expensive fees:

• ​Use NCOA every mailing, every time. About a fifth of the US population moves every year – you need to use NCOA (while a fifth of the population moves, there are numbers being tossed around that as high as 40% supposedly do not tell the USPS that they have moved!)
• Remember, NCOA expires 95 days from the date of the update. Be sure the NCOA database is up-to-date.
• You cannot add addresses at the last minute that have not been through NCOA processing, even seeds.

​If you don’t already have it, you can go here to download the January 2014 Move Update guidelines.