* Making sure snail mail gets to the right place
You might think “address quality services” refers to the real estate maxim of “location, location, location,” but it’s just the opposite. Address quality services include all the corrections necessary to ensure snail mail from you gets to the right person. Since people move, addresses change and zip codes mutate over time, it’s no wonder snail mail bounces more than e-mail. However, bouncing e-mail doesn’t cost you nearly as much as return postage or lost invoices.
Of course, if you’re Ford Motor Company and send truckloads of mail daily, you have multiple options for address cleaning. But if you’re Joe’s Ford Dealer and send just a few hundred mail pieces a few times per year, your options are limited. That’s what makes DuoShare’s Address Quality Integrator for QuickBooks such an interesting new product for small and midsize businesses.
Small companies always have snail mail address problems. The problems start with the fact most companies have multiple address lists with no coordination between them. Take a look at your own company before you argue. You have a list of customer addresses in your accounting package (usually QuickBooks, but not always) so you can send these customers invoices. You have a list of suppliers in your accounting package, or maybe in a spreadsheet on the computer of the person who does purchasing. You have a list of employees with your payroll program or service. You have a spreadsheet or three full of friends and partners from the Christmas party. None of these lists, maintained by different people, ever get crosschecked or updated until a letter comes back.
DuoShare VP Stephen Buck says they’ve never seen a completely accurate list, and some lists have more bad than good addresses. The company offers automated services that check names and addresses against the Post Office official data, and tell you which addresses work or don’t.
Lists degrade immediately, sometimes even before the record gets completely typed into your accounting program. What if you type 1234 Main rather than 1243 Main? What if your customer used to have a rural route address that’s being upgraded by their town to a “real” address so emergency vehicles can find them? What if the Post Office changes the Zip Code?
Every time a person fills out a change of address card, the Post Office makes the new information available to service companies like DuoShare. Federal privacy regulations tightly control who gets the information and how they can use it. Address cleaning checks names and addresses in your list against the many changes that turn your mailed catalogs into postage-due boomerangs.
DuoShare uses a small client application on your computer running QuickBooks to provide weekly synchronization to keep your addresses current. You can also run a manual synchronization just before a mailing.
Letting DuoShare arrange your mailing will save you money as well. The Post Office gives big discounts to mailers who do some of their work for them, such as putting machine readable bar codes on the envelopes and arranging mail in delivery order. You have to take your mailers to a bulk mail center (every big town has one) to get the discount, but some neighborhood Post Offices will accept bulk mail.
DuoShare claims you will save money using its service if you mail 200 pieces at bulk rates or 500 at first-class rates. In other words, you’ll spend less on DuoShare than your discount from the Post Office.
Postage meter vendors tout bulk savings, but the address cleaning services are above and beyond the cost of the meter. Address updates get sent on CDs anywhere from 30 to 90 days after the vendor receives the address change database from the Post Office. DuoShare appears to be the first in the market to provide updated addresses within 24 hours. It is also the first to integrate with QuickBooks.
Bowing to customer requests, DuoShare will accept your spreadsheets full of addresses, cleans them and then downloads them to your QuickBooks for not too much money. Using DuoShare through QuickBooks will also get you a price break over using DuoShare directly.
Printers often promise to clean your addresses for you, but check that carefully. Since they make money based on how much you print, do you really think they work hard to clean addresses and reduce your mailing piece number? Of course, some printers now subscribe to DuoShare’s service on a wholesale basis, but check to make sure.
Snail mail remains the standard way to put important paper (like invoices and catalogs) in customer hands. But no one says you have to waste money to do so, especially if you use QuickBooks.
