Questions · Addresses

Why does mail come back, and how do you reduce returned mail?

The most common causes

A return costs more than a stamp: the postage, the time to find out it did not arrive, often a second mailing after tracing the right address. Looking at real contact lists the causes repeat almost identically, and most of them are in the address as written, not in the recipient. Before printing, it is worth looking at the list with these points in mind:

• Street abbreviated or written informally. “kalverstr 92” instead of “Kalverstraat 92”: the postman almost always recognises it, but it is not the correct delivery form and on large campaigns the margin of error adds up.
• Postcode wrong, incomplete or in the wrong format. In the Netherlands the postcode identifies the stretch of street: “1012LG” without the space still works, a code from another stretch does not. In other countries a generic city code can send the letter to the wrong sorting office.
• Missing house number. Without the number the address is incomplete: sometimes delivery succeeds anyway, often it does not.
• A district or hamlet instead of the municipality. When the locality written is a neighbourhood or an absorbed village, the municipality is unclear and the address may be unrecognisable even though the street exists.
• “c/o”, floor and flat inside the address field. When this information mixes with the street name, the house number can end up in the wrong place or disappear altogether.
• The recipient has moved. Here the address as written is not at fault: it is the list that needs updating, and no verification can know that by itself. When the address itself no longer exists in the national register, though, we flag it.

What changes when you fix the address before printing

An address verified before printing arrives in the correct delivery form: street in full, postcode confirmed, city in its official form. It is not an absolute guarantee, nobody can give one, but it removes from the pile all the returns that depend on how the address is written rather than on where the recipient is. On a list of a few thousand names it is often the biggest part of the avoidable returns, and also the cheapest to remove: you fix it once, before printing, instead of paying the postage, the return and the tracing of the right recipient afterwards.

The gain shows above all in the countries whose national address register is in service, where street and house number are checked one by one, and on old lists, where addresses were written over the years by different people, each with their own abbreviations and habits.

The correction is always declared

When we fix an address we write it down, field by field: what it was and what it became. If the address cannot be rebuilt with certainty — a street not found in the municipality, insufficient data — it stays flagged with the reason, for a manual check. We would rather leave you a declared doubt than print a guessed address: an address wrong out of false certainty is worse than one left pending, because you only find out about the first when the letter comes back.

Who gains from it

Whoever manages large lists feels it most: direct marketing campaigns, invoicing, mailings to members or donors, CRM records fed by several channels over the years. The bigger and older the list, the more likely it has accumulated the small errors that do no harm on their own but add up to a return rate you see at the end of the campaign. Verifying before printing does not require changing how you work: you take the file as it is, with the columns you already have, and download it corrected, ready for label printing or for the mailing house.

An address that would have come back

Outcome: modified. Street in full, postcode in the Dutch form, house number verified in the national register. The name is invented for demonstration purposes; any reference to real persons is purely coincidental.