Understanding Unaddressed Admail – It Can Save Time, Money and Aggravation
It’s interesting to see more of our clients using Unaddressed Admail. I think that this stems from a better appreciation of the product, which includes the ability to specifically target Unaddressed Admail pieces with Canada Post’s GeoPost services.
Unaddressed Admail is a great product, and we encourage its use, but it does have a few peculiarities. If you aren’t familiar with them, you may experience disappointment or frustration.
Like Addressed Admail, Unaddressed Admail has different size options and pricing levels. What is quite different, though, is that the size options not only vary by Standard and Premium, but also by letter carrier and non-letter carrier delivery. You can tell which is which by the second character of the FSA. The FSA is the first 3 characters of the postal code and, if the second character of the FSA is a digit ranging from 1 – 9, then delivery occurs via letter carrier service. If the second digit of the FSA is a 0, then it will be non-letter carrier delivery.
This variation by delivery service must be taken into account when designing a direct mail piece that will be delivered within a broad geographic area (e.g. county, township etc.). Otherwise, if the size of the pieces exceed specifications for a particular type of delivery service, they could actually be rejected by Canada Post. And, if already printed, that could be very expensive!
Next you must consider delivery times. These can range from a few days for local delivery, to a few weeks if you are sending your Unaddressed Admail right across the country. This can be very important if your piece is time sensitive. With Premium Unaddressed Admail, though, you can specify the range of dates over which you would like your Unaddressed Admail to be delivered. Although a bit more expensive, this can help to ensure that the mail is not delivered before a specified date. Of course, if you are using the Premium service and you are delivering mail across the country, you still have to build in the appropriate amount of time to get it from the station of deposit to the delivery stations.
When mailing Unaddressed Admail to business addresses, you may also want to look at including a phrase to route it to the appropriate position. Mail often goes to the receptionist in smaller companies and to the mailroom in larger organizations, and depending on what you are offering, the receptionist or mailroom workers may not know where to direct your mail. For example, if you are offering health benefit programs you may want to specify “Attention: Human Resources Manager” directly on the mailing piece.
Lastly, I would be remiss if I failed to mention one of the “gotchas” that pops up from time to time with Unaddressed Admail, which is, that the pieces must not have a postal indicia. If they do, then Canada Post will not accept the mailing. This can be very easy to overlook, especially if you are printing pieces that are to be delivered by both Addressed and Unaddressed Admail. The common error that we see is that the Addressed Admail indicia is printed on both the addressed and unaddressed pieces. The only remedies, unfortunately, are to reprint the pieces or to apply labels over the indicias. Of course, either of these options can prove to be expensive.
As I noted above, we think that Unaddressed Admail is a great product and it fits well into many different types of marketing programs. However, as you can see, there are a few things that you must keep in mind to use it effectively.
If you are not familiar with Unaddressed Admail or if you feel that you may not be using it to its full potential, simply give us call here at Highland Marketing. We are only too pleased to help.
