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Postal Verification

Posted: Thu Sep 04, 2008 5:03 am
by Vkharia
Hi,

Can anyone tell me what is "Postal Verification" related to Quality Stage & where can I find information related to it.

Thanks
-Vimz

Posted: Thu Sep 04, 2008 7:10 am
by ray.wurlod
Welcome aboard.

Postal verification is where you have an address and look it up against a database supplied by the postal authorities to determine that it is an address (or delivery point) that actually exists.

Search (here, Google, IBM, etc) for terms such as SERP, CASS, DPID - all of these are such databases.

For extra money than "vanilla QualityStage", IBM will include one or more of these with QualityStage and keep them up to date at agreed intervals.

Posted: Thu Sep 04, 2008 7:41 pm
by vmcburney
If you barcode your mail it makes the address machine readable and easy to sort and you get a discount on postage. In Australia barcoded mail can receive up to 17% discount off postage. If you send 1 million letters a year the Australian discount is between $26K and $76K. The QualityStage license and DPID module and a project team to implement it costs about five times that amount.

The other advantage is a reduction in returned mail for wrong addresses - you can output bad addresses that fail barcoding for clerical review. This saves you 100% of the postage cost for every time you send that mail and usually about 20% of postage addresses held in databases are invalid.

Since the barcode is effectively a unique surrogate key for a mailing address you can use it to control lost and returned mail. If an address from one database is returned to sender then you can block that address in other mailouts from other databases by putting the barcode on a do not send list.

The other benefit from barcoding and cleansing addresses is in customer analytics and reports by geographic locations.