Address Change Service – ACS
March 30, 2017   Dave Lewis

Make money; save money…do something good with money! ACS is one of our favorite and most underused services. It’s easy to use, affordable, and provides valuable data.  If your piece of mail is undeliverable as addressed (UAA) you get an electronic notice telling you so.  If there’s a new address on file you get it.  If not, you get the reason for nondelivery.  If you’re a Full Service IMb mailer, the Postal Service charges nothing.  That’s pretty much it. Is it hard? Nah – SnailWorks does almost all of the work.  Here’s the process:

• You need your own Mailer ID (MID). If you’re tracking mail with us, you probably already have one;
• We help you register your MID for ACS with the Postal Service. It’s easy, because we walk you through it. You also need to direct the ACS data to our FTP site. Again, we’ll show you how;
• When you barcode your mailing you change the Service Type ID (STID) in the barcode. We’ll tell you which one to use;
• For Standard Mail you will need to print an ancillary endorsement on the piece: “Electronic Service Requested.” First-Class Mail needs no ancillary endorsement. The hardest part of that step is spelling “ancillary.”
• You mail your mail. You know how to do that;
• You go to the tracking reports on the job and select ACS on the dropdown menu and download the changes.

That’s it. It’s easier than six steps make it look, and everybody wins:  The mail owner gets corrected addresses and removes undeliverables, the mail service provider can charge a few bucks and make their customer happy, and the Postal Service gets less UAA mail.  Win, win, win! SnailWorks will charge you a small setup fee to get you started, and a small per-job fee to manage the data. This is not a hard decision. We have some clients tracking with us just so they can get ACS data.  Even after NCOA processing we still see undeliverable mail in every mailing.  People move. Contact us to learn more about how you can add ACS to your bag of mailing tricks.    

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