Keep It Clean

It doesn’t take very long to consider the quantities and cost per piece of your last mailing and apply the statistics above to figure how significant a savings you might realize by eliminating that segment of non-deliverable records.

For example, if you were to rent 100,000 names from various sources at an average cost of $90 per thousand and an average net arrangement of 85 percent, your budget dedicated to just the list rental would be $7,650. After duplicate elimination and suppression based on information compiled by the Direct Marketing Association, you might be left with roughly 80,000 unique names based on averages we’ve seen on mailings from many nonprofit groups and lists. To illustrate what some of these averages equate to in wasted dollars for your campaign were you to forgo postal processing, you could assume a conservative 10 percent to 15 percent of non-deliverable names — or 8,000 to 12,000 pieces based on this universe. The cost of those rental names would have been $720 to $1,080, and assuming that the combined creative, printing and postal costs came in at 75 cents per piece, there would be an additional loss of $6,000 to $9,000 for those packages.