Do Away with UAA

Tuesday, Jun 28th 2022

The mailing industry is filled with acronyms – DPV, LOT, CMYK, etc. But one in particular can be the death of profitability for a mail piece: Undeliverable As Addressed (UAA). Basically, UAA mail never gets to its intended recipient, making the paper, printing and postage a complete waste of money.

 

What happens to UAA?

If your piece is sent First-Class Mail, there’s a chance that a mis-addressed piece could still be delivered. If the recipient moved in the last 13 months the piece will be forwarded. If not, it will be returned to you so you can research the problem. Unfortunately most other mail doesn’t get as much love. With Standard Mail, UAA is “treated as waste”, which is a fancy term for “thrown in the recycle bin”. This creates a blind spot for the mailing industry – many mailers don’t know that their mail pieces are essentially thrown in the trash before they get to the mailbox.

According to a recent USPS Office of Inspector General (OIG) article, UAA mail has increased 2.1 percent over the last four years, even with all the advances in addressing technology. So those recycle bins have been working harder over time.

What can you do?

There are several steps mailers can take to limit UAA, but there has yet to be an easy way to eliminate it. The biggest factors in UAA are due to the addressee moving, or the address is incomplete, incorrect or illegible.

  1. Clean your mailing list
    In order to qualify for most postage discounts, mailers have to process address lists through CASS-certified software and a Move Update process like NCOALink. These steps ensure that correctable addresses are well formatted and up to date.
  2. Get more data
    Doing the bare minimum to cleanse your addresses will only get you so far. As noted above, the amount of UAA is increasing, even with the minimum standards. Fortunately there are additional ways to update your addresses, and many don’t take much more time. The easiest step is to look outside USPS for move update information. As the digital age progresses, fewer people are taking the time to file their moves with USPS. Fortunately, services like Satori Software’s ECOA offer an easy way to update addresses from utility companies, magazine subscriptions and more. Another way to capture more moves is to combine Move Update methods. Pre-processing your list with NCOALink, then following up with ACS can give you a more complete view of the moves in your list. Note that ACS data is free for your Full-Service mail. And if incorrect addresses are bothering you, investigate the Address Element Correction (AEC) services from USPS. These services are rather expensive, but they can help resolve those addresses not found by other means.
  3. Filter your list
    This is by far the most powerful, and overlooked, step in removing UAA. Even after processing through all the cleansing services available, there will likely be several addresses with problems – an incorrect building number, no forwarding address, or some other issue. Unless you are required to send these pieces out by regulation, it is best to remove undeliverable addresses from your mailings.
  4. Update those addresses
    Especially if you use post-mailing processes like ACS or AEC, make sure you have a system to collect the responses and update your lists. The data means nothing if you don’t integrate it back into your list.
  5. Lather, rinse, repeat
    If there’s any constant with addressing, it’s that things are always changing. People will continue to move, new homes and businesses will be built, and new algorithms will be created to better match an incorrect address with the correct one. To navigate these waters, determine a routine for address management, whether it be daily, weekly, or monthly. Then, regularly review your processes to see how they work, and adjust accordingly.

The topic of UAA is too large to cover in one article. But as the USPS OIG found, UAA mail has been increasing lately. What steps do you take to limit UAA?