Greetings & salutations from your neighborhood survey partners, DataForce Research here!
If you are involved in survey research, the odds are high that you engage in mailing services to reach your respondents. One question that comes up on nearly every project – When will the mail reach my survey participants?
As of 2018, this question became a lot easier for us to answer, with a surprisingly high degree of accuracy. At that time, the USPS (United States Postal Service) introduced their Informed Visibility policy, which allows for mail to be tracked directly to the respondents door.
Companies are able to join to that technology to produce daily reports showing the in-home delivery rates for each of your projects. If you have worked with a full service mailing team in the past few years, there is a high chance that you have relied on one of these types of reports.
The Mail Tracking Reports available today, can track mail delivery rates with a variety of statistics, allowing you to see things such as delivery timelines from the date of mailing, in home delivery rates by the state level, and even at the local office level!
The technology is surprisingly simple. Each piece of mail gets scanned at multiple points along its route to delivery, and that scanned information gets compiled in a mail tracking platform to produce a project specific mailing report.
One caveat though. These reports rely on the accuracy of the local offices to scan each piece of mail. And simply put, some stations just don’t have the capabilities to scan each piece of mail. This does not mean they don’t get delivered, but it does result in about 3-5% of each project showing as ‘undelivered’.
If you are involved in survey research, or really any form of mailing project where schedules matter, you need to make sure your mailing team is using and providing you with these reports.
In addition to peace of mind and simply knowing your project mailed on time, these reports allow you to schedule follow up actions, such as additional mailings, and even scale operations by gauging the amount of participants contacted.
If you have any questions regarding how Mail Tracking Reports can benefit your survey project, please contact our business office today for a free consultation.
DataForce Research
Businessoffice@dataforceresearch.com