The truth about Undeliverable as Addressed Mail?

It is a letter or parcel that is unable to reach its intended recipient using the given address. Undeliverable as addressed (UAA) mail is either sent back to the sender or sent to the dead postal office.

This method allows the sender to reprocess the mail and send it again or the mail to undergo processing in the dead postal office. Undeliverable letters can be a total hindrance for individuals and businesses that depend mostly on direct mail.     

Mail order enterprises always suffer significant financial dents whenever a delivery fails to reach its destination. As an owner, you will have to deal with a frustrated customer who didn’t receive their order and still pay additional shipping fees.

 As most Americans change their addresses and not report the adjustment to the USPS, it leads to an increase in the number of UAA letters, which is alarming. It was evident in the year 2018 that seventeen percent of American citizens changed their addresses, and sixty percent did not report this adjustment to USPS.

What happens in the Dead Mail Office?

If a mail cannot reach the recipient and the sender's address is missing, it is sent to the dead mail office. It is the department within a post office that deals with undelivered letters. It serves as a sort of recycling station for undelivered and undeliverable mail.

The undelivered mail undergoes an inspection, and if there is a return address, it is resealed and delivered back to the sender. If no sender address is available, it stays in this office for roughly seven days.

In this period, the mail sender or recipient can file for a missing mail complaint. Such an application allows the postal service to trace the letter and deliver it at an additional cost.

However, if no one successfully claims the mail in the seven days, it is destroyed to protect privacy. Any valuable items within the mail face an auction.

In other cases, undelivered mails are sent to the mailing retrieval center. If you expect a letter or parcel and it does not reach within seven days, you can request for its search through a lost mail application or visit the nearest postal service offices where your mail piece will be located and returned to you.

Possible Reasons You Ended Up with Undelivered Mail.

Two major reasonscan cause mail to be undelivered: address issues and postage charge issues. These causes can be complemented with many other reasons that can make a letter/parcel undeliverable. 

Some of these reasons are as follows;

• Addressing letters and parcels to a post office, street, or number that does not exist
• Sending packages that have an insufficient address. Such a mailing can be from another mail office, but some information like the state, city, box number, or the right address is absent. 
• An illegible address can also cause a mail piece to be undelivered.
• If the sender endorses his/her mail with clear instructions not to forward the mail or the order for forwarding the mail has expired.
• If a mail is addressed to a geographical area beyond the confines of mail workplace address, such postings will be held by the office for a stated period lest the recipient files an order.
• Also, a mail is said to be UAA if it does not have a stamp price or simply if the stamp price fell off.
• When the addressee is gone temporarily, and the duration for keeping the mail passed.
• If the sender violates the postal lottery rules, the mail will not proceed to the recipient.
• If the recipient goes against the Postal False Representation and Lottery Regulations.
• If the recipient does not claim a mail, it will eventually be undeliverable.
• In situations where the addressee is dead, and there is no proper way to deliver it to another person.        

All the above reasons should explain to your organization why, at times, mails are UAA packages. After identifying why your mail deliveries are sometimes incomplete, it will be easier to fix this issue. The good news is that all these problems have a solution. All you need to do is follow the set procedures to the letter.

A postage charge is a payment you make as a charge for sending mail through the United States Postal Service. Most mailing businesses pay for this charge; hence, it is not much of an issue for them in undelivered mail.

However, when a piece of mail fails to contain a postage stamp, it can become undeliverable if it lacks a return address or has a similar destination and return addresses. When this happens, the mail is considered dead mail.

The impact of undelivered as addressed mail can be costly and time consuming to an organization. A typical mailing process is mostly manual. Having a UUA mail is an extra expense that will require resources like workforce input, production materials, and postage fees, which can cost your business a lot of money.

Examples of Address Issues That Cause a Mail to Be UAA and Ways to avoid them. 

The address of the recipient is a leading issue that prevents the successful delivery of mail. Here are a few examples of address issues that can bring about undeliverable as addressed mail:

1. Sending the Mail to a Nonexistent or Ineligible Address. 

When you send mail to an address that doesn’t exist or is not readable, it automatically becomes undelivered mail. If you don’t put a return address that mail is as good as gone. Using the wrong formatting as well as misspelling street names can also cause mail not to be delivered to its destination.

To prevent this from happening, you should always ensure that you double-check the addresses before sending any postal item. Ensure that the address is accurate and contains the appropriate format.

Instead of carrying out a manual check system, consider investing in an autonomous checklist system that utilizes software to confirm a client's address before any shipping occurs.

2. Sending Mail to a Disputed Address. 

Sometimes one or more persons may be in dispute over the right to a certain address. As long as the issue is unresolved, the postal service cannot deliver mail to that address.

To avoid this address issue, always ensure that your firm has a disputed address policy. Such policies state that a firm will not be financially and legally responsible for deliveries sent to disputed addresses.

When this happens, the client has the sole responsibility to ensure that their address is not involved in any ownership conflict. If the address has ownership disputes, then the client will incur the return and reshipping fees.

3. Sending Mail to a Deceased or Imprisoned Person. 

When mail arrives at an address of a deceased or imprisoned person, it needs an individual at that address to receive it. If this cannot happen, then it is deemed a dead package that goes back to the post office. It is then returned to the sender or destroyed, depending on the circumstances.

It is rare to get a mail response from a person who is dead or in prison. It is better to remove them from your mailing list when sending out information. This change may not improve your income, but it will help to reduce costs associated with postage charges.

Mail-order businesses, in particular, should conduct routine client address validations to ensure they are not wasting time and resources.

4. Sending Mail to a Vacant Address or an Address Where a Person Has Moved Out. 

When mail is sent to an address where there are no people registered to live there, it is automatically added to undeliverable as addressed mail. The same applies when mail goes to an address where the owner has moved.

The latter is the most common between the two. People often moved to a new place and forget to file for a forwarding address. Such a mistake prevents the person from receiving forwarded mail when it is sent to their old address.

A simple way to avoid this issue is ensuring your clients provide their current mailing address even if you already have such information from past transactions. Each time they purchase an item, they should update their shipping address information.

The Cost of Undelivered Mail to Your Firm. 

Using a mailingbusiness to reach out to existing and potential customers has been a trend for a long time. This strategy still is the case, even with the invention of the internet. Mail provides a direct personal connection between traders and consumers.

One of the worst things that can happen when you use mail campaigns in your business is having undeliverable as addressed mail. Such delivery issues arise due to problems in the address the letter should go.

Promotional information that does not reach its intended target will reduce sales. Promotional data will either come to the consumer late or not arrive at all. Businesses also have to incur other costs of reprocessing, repackaging, and resending the mail to the appropriate address.

Such a process may not sound like an expensive endeavor, but remember, you have to pay the post-service return charges for the undelivered mail. These costs vary depending on the priority class of the letter or parcel.

First-class mail, which is preferred by most mailers, has a higher cost compared to the others. And this is because the letter or parcel is given utmost priority during the mailing process. It will cause a significant dent in your finances when you have several or even hundreds of undeliverable as addressed mail.

Dropshipping firms are also hugely devastated by undelivered mail. As a dropshipping firm, you procure items directly from a manufacturer and use a third party shipping firm to send them to consumers.

When consumers fail to receive deliveries due to undeliverable as addressed issues, they always blame the mail order or drop shipping firm. In this era, the customer is always right. Even if it is their fault that the order failed to arrive, they will rarely accept blame and expect the business to fulfill the promised order.

Customer satisfaction and approval rates play a critical role in the development of any venture. The company may be forced to incur return shipping costs to ensure they make a successful sale and maintain a positive customer reputation.

The cost of undelivered mail is getting higher. 

If you still think that the cost of dead letters and parcels is still low, then that is a wrong conclusion. In recent years the fees for returning mail to the sender are increasing. Such an increase is because the rise of trivial addressing issues directly impacts the cost of processing mail.

As more and more simple address errors such as formatting and misspelling issues occur, firms' operating expenses increase significantly. It thus leads to a net increase in the price charged for mail returns.

Nowadays, the estimated cost of handling a piece of undeliverable mail is roughly 50 USD. After adding delays, losses, return shipping costs, and noncompliance fines, charges may skyrocket above the charge mentioned above. 

How to Avoid These Costs in Simple, Straightforward Ways

To save on expenses and reach your intended recipients, you need effective and productive methods to reduce the rate of return mail. Here are some of the best ways you can use to avoid the problem of having undeliverable as addressed mail:

Use a Move Update System.

Recent statistics show that roughly 17% of USA residents shift from one area to another within a year. It means that many people change locations, and most of them do not bother to conduct a change of address.

As a result, an estimated 75% of all undeliverable mail arises as a direct effect of people changing locations without updating their addresses.

The use of a move update system allows for automated update of addressees within your mailing list for individuals who have moved and changed their address. Mailers who use this move update system can get discounts on postage charges by the United States Postal Service.

Such a system can save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars by significantly reducing incidents of UAA letters and parcels. All you need to do is procure the software and pay a small monthly charge for the service. 

Convert the Physical Mail Information into a Digital Format.

Identifying a robust system to digitize and mechanize UAA mail can be an overwhelming but worth investing in since UAA is a problem that most mailing firms face. Also, the USPS and other postal service providers offer solutions that can help you with the automation and digitalization process.

Once you receive UAA postal item, scan and index the information first; after this, change it into a digital format. This process will help you get crucial answers to questions like why it was returned, whether the record was precise before mailing, and the number of times it has returned.

Different options can help you perform the above task without any hassle. Such choices include the USPS' address modification service that helps retrieve mail sent without an intelligent postal barcode.

Another solution is to take the mail to a postal service provider who knows how to handle returned mails. You can also use software with an ocular scanner and OCR to convert your letter or package into an electronic form.

Make Use of Delivery Point Validation Systems. 

Such a system confirms that an address you plan to send mail to see if it is active andregistered appropriately. Such a system can be used in the United States Postal Serviceonline platform to identify: Vacant address, deceased or imprisoned individual addresses, and confirm the identity of the address holder.

Such validation software can carry out various functions that include:

• Confirming if the written address meets the set standard and contains a valid physical address before any shipping occurs.
• Identifying the number of delivery fails to a specific location.
• Stopping the recurrent shipping of items to a non- responsive address

Such aDelivery Point Validation system will help in reducing the number of undeliverable as addressed mail. In turn, it will also help in reducing the postage expenses.

Winding up:

In closing, for you to reach clients and consumers through mail efficiently and engage them at a personal level, you need to improve on thecurrent mailing campaign proficiency. Create market-driven content that will appeal to your target client.

Use all approved tactics to ensure that your message and deliveries get to your recipients as fast as possible. Make sure that your mailing list is optimized, and your business will run smoothly. 

Avoiding undelivered mail can assist in reducing shipping costs and build better customer relations by ensuring deliveries reach the intended buyer on time.