I look at a lot of mail tracking jobs. It’s kind of my job. And anyone who tracks mail knows that you never get 100% of the pieces scanned. Pretty close sometimes – over 99% is not unusual – and sometimes not so close. But even if it is 99%. I still wonder where that other one percent is.
To help answer that question, we created the “Not Tracked to Delivery” report – not the most elegant name, but nicely descriptive. The report identifies the pieces not tracked to delivery and does a little analysis.
It identifies how many pieces got no scans at all (did the piece get spoiled? Missing a barcode?) You can see which pieces got at least one scan but never got scanned to delivery – it’s most likely somewhere in the USPS system and maybe even delivered, just missed a scan due to a processing anomaly. Finally, it identifies how many pieces were diverted by the PARS system as Undeliverable As Addressed (UAA.)
Pieces that were diverted by PARS (Postal Automated Redirection System if you must know) have an address defect. They were identified by PARS as UAA. There can be a variety of reasons: The person moved since the last NCOA update; the person never filed a change of address; the address on the file predates the NCOA file used for your mailing. There are other possible reasons, but these are the most likely.
Regardless of how meticulous you are about your mailing list, it is virtually impossible to do a mailing with 100% correct and current addresses. Below is the Not Tracked to Delivery report for an excellent 5,329-piece mailing with 99.25% of the pieces tracked to delivery:
All but 40 pieces tracked to delivery out of 5,329 – excellent! Of those 40 pieces, 29 got a PARS “hit.” They were undeliverable as addressed. If you click on the 29 under PARS, you will get a list of who they were: (We’ll just show the first few)
In looking at the detail report, you can see the type of PARS Process that was used for each piece. In the case of “COA,” there was a change of address on file and the mail was forwarded (depending on class of mail.) You can see a delivery date on some of those – they were delivered, but to a different address than originally on the piece. Some are marked Return to Sender, which generally means there was no COA on file. You can download this file and flag these records for further action. Better still, next time you should use Address Correction Service (ACS), and you will have the new address sent to you electronically. In this case we know some pieces were forwarded, but we don’t know where. To learn what the new address is you need to be participating in the USPS ACS program. SnailWorks provides ACS services – ask us about it!
So, 99.25% is pretty good delivery. Of course you want to fix those few incorrect addresses, but still, nice work!
Here’s another example that is more difficult:
In this case there were more than 1,400 PARS hits. This mailer would definitely want to explore what list issues may exist here. This would be an exceptional opportunity to use ACS. They could also use our new report, the PARS Summary, to get insight into what issues may exist in the list.
There are a lot of factors in making your list the best it can be. Looking at why it isn’t all being tracked to delivery may be a great place to start. Want help? Reach out to your Project Manager, or contact us.