What If Your Mail Isn’t Delivered?

What happens if you place a postcard into bulk mail distribution, and within a week, you’ve gotten no leads and spot checking with key customers or prospects reveals that no one has seen hide nor hair of it? The printer claims to have dropped it into the mail. What do you do? Especially if this was a time-sensitive promotion, such concerns can be devastating. Perhaps the campaign was promoting a special weekend sale or was coordinated to arrive several days before a major holiday.

Manage Expectations

First, it’s important to be realistic about expectations. For national campaigns, it’s not uncommon for delivery to take up to two weeks, depending on where the campaign is being mailed from and where it is going to.

A lot depends on the location of the mailing house and how close it is to the majority of your mail recipients. Is the mail traveling long distances? If so, delivery will take extra time. If you are postal sorting, was the mail drop shipped (trucked) to USPS distribution centers? Or did all of the mail ship from the same location? What was the format of the mail? Was it a non-standard size that might slow down the process?

Especially if your mail is not going locally, you need to give yourself extra time. Sure, in some cases, the mail piece might end up arriving earlier than you think is ideal, but it’s the trade-off you make for paying the lower postage rate.

Ask for the 3600/3602 Statement

If you want confirmation that the mail actually went out, the mailing vendor should be able to provide you with a 3600 (first-class) or 3602 (standard) statement from the U.S. Post Office. These are basically detailed receipts for your mailing, confirming the weight, postage amount, postage affixed, name of the mailer, date of the mailing, and other information. If you are doing postal sortation, the second page also details how many pieces were in each sort.

Planet Codes and IMBs can cost as little as only a few dollars per thousand, so you aren’t adding a lot of cost for an extraordinary benefit.

Statements don’t tell you when the mailers arrived (if they arrived), but they do indicate that they went out when the printer or mail house said they did. The USPS will generally provide a round-stamped (dated) copy of the postage statement to the mailer once it has been verified. A PostalOne receipt can be provided, as well.

Make a Fuss

Contact your service provider and let them know how upset you are by the delay. If you didn’t track the mail, there isn’t a lot they can do, but there are some things. In addition to providing you with the postal statement, they can call the local distribution centers and work with people there to try to track it down.

You can also contact your local representative for the Business Service Network (BSN), the customer service portion of the U.S. Postal Service. (This is not to be confused with Business Services Network, which is a print and mail house.) Checking on late or non-delivery of mail is one of the services they do for marketers and mail service providers. You can send them a PDF of the piece, along with sample ZIP codes, and they will research your question. The results may not be timely, and the process may not provide recourse for USPS mistakes, but the process can at least provide answers.

Plan for Next Time

Once mail is dropped into the postal system, your options are limited. So your best defense is offense.

Next time around, consider using Planet Codes or Intelligent Mail Barcodes (IMBs) to track exact delivery times. Unlike POSTNET codes, which are designed to automate mail and enable postal sorts, Planet Codes and IMBs enable detailed tracking all the way through the system. They can tell you when each sort arrives at each postal “nerve center,” and if you want to track down to the individual piece level, you can do that.