Missing without trace – Phantom Mailings

Missing without trace – An article published in the May 2001 edition of Direct Marketing International

Universal Postal Union Customer Day, Berne, Switzerland.

AS ENTIRE mailings go missing, postai operators stand accused of widespread failure to deliver international direct mail.

In Berne to speak to the Universal Postal Union, leading list broker James Thornton hit out at those postal services known to be giving international mailers a raw deal. "Testing over the last twelve months has indicated that some authorities are just not doing their job adequately – particularly where Surface Air Lift is used:' he said."The bottom line is that you get an immediate lift in response by mailing first-class. There is something seriously wrong and we are going to have to do something. It is a very big problem if direct mail that mailers are paying for doesn't get to its destination.

Low Priority – Low Response

THE ASIA-based guru mainly blames mail marked 'low priority' for the bad response. Why? "The only possible conclusion is that the slower services labelled in this way are arriving in destination countries and being put to one side by the receiving postal authority to be delivered later or not at all:' he claimed. "Sometimes whole mailings disappear' Speaking on UPU's Customer Day theme of "delivering more to the World," Thornton fired a number of salvos to send operators reeling: "Mailers are discovering that average response rates from the small countries are much higher.
Mail is getting delivered there with much greater certainty than in the bigger ones, but response should be the same if all items eventually get there – even though SAL is slower," he told delegates.
Among the most serious cases so far uncovered, neither of two separate 200,000 mailings via a leading European postal administration went to the intended recipients. And neither mailer seems to have been fully compensated for the losses by the post offices concerned – a sure sign of things going badly wrong. In yet another shocking instance, a regional mailing by The Economist of 40,000 pieces into one Asian country generated no response whatever: When an investigator was dispatched to the scene, the whole lot was found dumped in the far corner of a Philpost warehouse.

Testing out of the US, National Geographic found that IPA (International Priority Airlift) generated a 35 per cent lift in response against ISAL (International Surface Air Lift). UK-based Business Monitor got a similar resuft from testing Royal Mail's Priority Sorted against their Standard Sorted service to global destinations, achieving a far higher response to the former.

Serious Stuff

ITS SERIOUS stuff for cross-border mailers. "The postal element represents nearly half the cost of getting a campaign into the mail:' said Thornton, veteran of 25 years international mailing and owner of the international list brokerage MLA. "I believe the problem lies with individuals handling mail in the more populous countries who recognise low-priority bulk mail for what it is They know it is not personal mail and that not a single one of those
letters will be missed by their addressees if they are not delivered. The postman on his rounds also knows it and the temptation not to deliver such items must be enormous if it's too wet, too cold or too hot ft's different if the outer envelope indicates first-class mail, however."
A major contributory factor is that smaller countries receiving foreign mail also get paid more under the terminal dues system than for domestic mail. "For example, if someone in the US wants to mail to an island in the Caribbean and the sack is below the minimum weight or quantity for ISAL or SAL delivery, then you are forced to mail first-class. So that is why a lot of the mail going to these smaller countries is being delivered and getting higher response rates:' Thornton explained.
"I believe it is strongly in the postal industry's interests to develop more discounted first-class mail products for high volume mailers who are able to negotiate an acceptable rate and also to focus a lot more on improved delivery for surface air lift products, so that smaller mailers to big countries get a higher response. Either way, direct mailers may well mail higher volumes in the future if response rates are higher."