First mailer went out a week and a half ago. It was 498 pieces to growing counties in Tennessee. I’ve been patiently waiting for my email to explode and phone to blow up and haven’t heard a peep. Today, I found out part of the reason why.
I use a UPS mailbox, and they called today. I have 230 pieces of undeliverable mail there! I used addresses pulled from PropStream. The reasons vary from “No such street” to “Insufficient address” among others.
My next batch will be delinquent taxes with addresses from the county. I haven’t written this batch off though. After all, there are still 268 pieces that people have in their hot little hands, just itching to accept my offer!
@shanebpp oh wow, that’s a terrible deliverability rate. I’m sorry to hear about that. At least you were able to figure this out with 498 pieces instead of 3,000 or more!
Were you able to see how up-to-date the data was in PropStream? That might be one thing to check out, just to make sure you’re not working with 12+ month-old data… although the “no such street” thing sounds like an even bigger problem. Even if the data is old, the streets should exist at least!
Also, not sure if some kind of error was made in the mail merge or in sorting the list (like maybe address elements being mixed and matches, or entire columns being deleted), but that might be another thing to look at.
@retipsterseth I’m going to go back and look at the merge. I also still have the properties saved in Propstream, so taking a look at what I have as a mailing address and what was provided shouldn’t be too tough. I’m leaning toward human error until I can rule it out.
@shanebpp if it wasn’t human error (if PropStream’s data is truly messed up or outdated in that county), you could always let their support know about it, just so they’re aware of the problem.
@retipsterseth definitely human error. I sorted my list in some way where names and addresses got mixed up. Probably just sorted one column instead of the whole sheet. I’m glad it’s something I can easily fix though!