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 postage/printing value of around $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 QuickAddress Batch.

The Solution: Solving Hidden Data Problems
QuickAddress Batch cleanses address data by verifying it against the records held by leading national postal authorities, such as the U.S. Postal Service.  The product also enables the separation of questionable, or “to-be-checked” 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 QuickAddress 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.

Conclusion: A Look Ahead
Brigade Quartermasters management are now testing QuickAddress Pro, a point-of-entry solution that verifies addresses as they’re being entered into a database. QuickAddress Pro and QuickAddress Batch work in tandem to provide a long-term, profit-saving solution for address data management.