How to Save Money by Rate Shopping for Lowest Carrier Fees
By Teri Dimon, marketing specialist, Melissa Data

If you ship, you probably mail. Which means, you already know the value and benefits of quality contact information and address accuracy.

Address correction alone ensures that your address information is formatted to USPS® standards to take advantage of postal automation discounts and to speed processing. CASS™ processing, which now includes DPV™ (delivery point validation), eliminates undeliverable returns, reduces waste and additional charges, and minimizes your time, material and postage expenses.

For parcel shippers, a delivery type indicator that uses the 9-digit ZIP Code™ or an 11-digit ZIP + 4® Delivery Point Code can take your package shipping to the highest possible level of efficiency and reduce your costs to the lowest possible rates available across a wide range of delivery options.

So how do you choose your delivery option? Whichever one is going to charge the least to get your package delivered promptly and efficiently, right?

Shipping carriers charge clients surcharges based on the characteristics of the package. Many include a surcharge for delivery to a residential address or for a Saturday delivery. Surcharges can be as simple as $5 or $15 per address or a residential delivery surcharge of approximately $1.40. These fees can be recognized and captured at the time of data entry and address coding. The residential - business delivery type indicator provides you with the information to help determine the best way to ship your packages in order to keep your shipping costs at a minimum for both you and your customer.

When you consider that 91% of the 140 million delivery points in the United States are classified as residential, and 87% of new U.S. delivery points are also residential, the ability to identify the residential deliveries upfront could add up to substantial savings throughout the year.

This is exactly why Kaplan Early Learning Company, Lewisville North Carolina, recently added address verification with the delivery type indicator to their mailing and shipping operations. According to Connie Ellis, the IT Systems Analyst at Kaplan, the delivery type indicator will be used for rate shopping between UPS and USPS parcels in the future. She says they currently only ship UPS for most of their packages and need to “rate-shop to determine if the USPS will provide savings for Kaplan on the smaller packages.”

Kaplan runs the Address Object on their main computer to rate between UPS and LTL. They are gathering rates to run comparisons and hope they can save money on shipping if they can use both UPS and USPS. Ellis says that they currently use Address Object on their consumer Web site to format and validate addresses entered for orders, and will soon have it up and running on their business site. “We’re excited about the large percentage of our addresses that validate,” she adds.

Ellis says she also works closely with the order entry / customer setup at Kaplan for their customers. “I’m working with them to evaluate all this great information and how Kaplan can make the best use of it (delivery type indicator) for the billing and shipping side also.”

Kaplan Early Learning Company, founded in 1951 in Greensboro, North Carolina, specializes in providing unique toys and gifts that promote learning as well as to help children prepare for life-long success. One of their goals, says Ellis, is to reduce returned mail- mostly catalogs and postcards- and have the ability to use USPS as a shipping option once the address is verified to AABB standards.

A delivery type indicator tool is only available as an add-on component to existing mailing and shipping applications, whether you’re using a software program, an API, or a Web service. It’s most effective when the delivery address has been validated through CASS with DPV. The tool will identify the type of delivery as residential or business/commercial at the same time the address is being verified and postal encoded, so there’s no extra downtime identifying the type of property. You can use the indicator tool for batch processing an entire list or apply it to single address, point-of-entry applications used on Web forms or in call centers.

By adding an address verification feature with a delivery type indicator to your web forms, you can provide consumers the same rate-shopping service you use internally. This allows them to compare parcel shipping rates and delivery options to their address.

Whether you need to improve your shipping operation or empower customers to choose the most appropriate shipping option for their purchase, using a delivery type indicator just makes sense (and cents). It provides the information you and your customers need to make informed shipping decisions, rate shop for the lowest carrier fees and save money over the long haul.

Greg Brown is marketing director at Melissa Data, a data quality software and services provider based in Rancho Santa Margarita, CA. Teri Dimon is a marketing specialists. You can reach them at (949) 589-5200 or by email :greg@melissadata.com or teri@melissadata.com