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Subscribe to our eNewsletterQAS saves Brigade $27,000 in catalog mailing costs
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Mail-Order Company Saves $27,000 in One Mailing Using QAS Batch
Brigade Quartermasters Ltd., a leading mail-order supplier of adventure gear and apparel to military and civilian customers, recently turned to QAS to help them save on catalog mailing costs to customers and prospects.
The problem: Bad addresses waste printing and mailing dollars
The Georgia-based Brigade Quartermasters was founded in 1976 to sell one product: the Woolly Pully® patched military sweater. Since then, the company has grown to a $20 million operation that supplies the United States armed forces and civilians around the world with everything from desert boots to binoculars to compasses.
Brigade mails over two million 132-page catalogs per year via standard pre-sort and also sends tens of thousands of pieces of marketing materials to prospects. Catalogs cost between $0.36 and $0.38 each, for a total cost of about $1.17 per catalog mailed. Because the catalogs are sent standard pre-sort, any incorrectly addressed pieces are simply destroyed by the U.S. Postal Service® without notifying Brigade. This means that data problems could lurk for years without company managers realizing catalogs and new business were being lost at a large cost.
Company CFO Geoffrey B. WerBell explains the previous process for mail:
"We use outside services to process our National Change of Address and merge-purge address data files. For over 25 years, we have assumed that the resulting file would yield 100% deliverable addresses. Some of the pieces we'd sent first-class were returned to our mailroom, and we saw that they had incomplete addresses. I then began questioning the service bureau. 'How do I, as a mailer, know what is a good address?' I decided to test our addresses with a trial version of QAS Batch."
The solution: Solving hidden data problems
QAS Batch cleanses address data by verifying it against the records held by leading national postal authorities such as the U.S. Postal Service. In just minutes, QAS Batch provides a detailed report along with a graphical analysis of the health of address data base. The product also enables the separation of questionable address data from the cleansed list so that mailings can continue while incorrect addresses are double-checked.
When he performed his analysis, WerBell was astonished to find that over 7% of the addresses for a recent catalog mailing were incorrect, improperly formatted, or duplicates, and were thus likely to be unacceptable by the U.S. Postal Service and private delivery firms.
"The total number of catalogs that in all likelihood were discarded by the post office were 23,259, at a value of $27,213," WerBell reports.
In all, 7.05% of catalogs sent out contained addresses so invalid that they
were ultimately undeliverable. Before working with QAS Batch, Brigade
management had no way of quantifying this information because third-class mail
with unverifiable addresses is simply destroyed by the post office without
notifying the sender.
WerBell and his team made the decision to implement QAS Batch, which is updated with new USPS data every two months, right away.
"QAS is a good solution that is proven to have saved us money, and we look forward to using it in the future," he said.
Conclusion: A look ahead
Brigade Quartermasters management is so pleased with the QAS Batch solution that the group is now testing QAS Pro, a point-of-entry data solution that verifies addresses as they're being entered into a database. The products work in tandem to ensure a best-of-breed, long-term solution for address data quality.
QAS Batch is currently available for Windows 95/98/NT/2000/ME/XP. Also available... QAS Pro, an international address management tool for the address capture and accurate verification of addresses, which are held in the postal address files of supported countries, including the United States.
QAS Pro Web validates addresses as they're entered via your website, which means that addresses entering your database from the Web are valid and correctly formatted from the point-of-entry.
