ACS is Free. How Come Nobody Uses It?
March 27, 2019   Dave Lewis

If a letter carrier attempts to deliver a piece of mail and he/she cannot do so because it is undeliverable as addressed (UAA), the Postal Service will send you an electronic notice telling you that it wasn’t delivered and why.  It’s called Address Change Service (ACS).  On average, 33% of the time they will include a NEW address for the undelivered piece.  The other 67% of the time they’ll tell you why (usually forwarding order expired.) Nice, huh?  Oh, and the price?  $0.00.  Free.  Nada.  As long as it’s part of a Full-Service mailing.  (Most commercial mail is these days.) The catch?  You have to ask for it.  On First-Class Mail you ask by flipping a few bars in the IMb, and you need to register your MID with the ACS program if you use your own MID on mail pieces.  Same thing on Marketing Mail and Nonprofit, but you also need to add the endorsement “Electronic Service Requested” to your mail piece. As cool and free as ACS is, usage is dismal:

• 30% for First-Class Mail;
• 15% for Marketing Mail.
• Yuck.

Why so unpopular?

• Fundraisers HATE endorsement lines;
• USPS has, in the past, made the service “mostly” free, so folks were terrified of thrills in the bills. It really is free now.
• It requires doing something, and it’s always easier to do nothing than something.

Our mission at SnailWorks is to make pretty easy things even easier, and we can do that with ACS.  OK, nonprofits: not everything you mail is a fundraising package – we’ll help you get UAA data on everything else.  Many of our clients tell us that ACS updates is the most important data they receive from their mail tracking – they love it! So, don’t do nothing…do something!  Contact us and we’ll get you all set up on ACS.  Everyone will be happy – Us, the Postal Service, your clients, their clients, and you!

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