We’ll Get That for You

Going overseas and don’t want to burden your neighbors to bring in the post — or miss any important mail? Earth Class Mail may be the solution.

The business serves as an online mailbox for customers, who typically give out their Earth Class Mail address like a P.O. box.

“Many customers are [expatriates who’ve gone] overseas,” says Ron Wiener, founder and CEO of Earth Class Mail Corp., Seattle. “Or they may be people who just want to change their address once for the rest of their life.”

The outer envelopes or wrappers of mail received daily are scanned and uploaded as high-resolution images for customers to view online. Customers then instruct Earth Class Mail whether they want the mail securely opened and scanned, shredded, recycled, transferred elsewhere or forwarded to them. No mail is opened without customer approval.

“When a customer asks us to shred or recycle, we ask them if they’d like us to contact the company on their behalf and let them know they don’t want [the mailings] and why,” Wiener says. “It could be a house-file customer who says ‘I don’t need 52 copies of this catalog. I only need one on my anniversary and one on my wife’s birthday.’ Or they’re getting duplicate copies or have moved.”

The opportunity is a good way for marketers to hone their prospecting for the next cycle, and gain knowledge about what demographics or ZIP codes may respond — or not — to their mailings, according to Wiener.

“It’s difficult to get people to call a marketer and say ‘Don’t waste your money on me, because I’m not interested.’ But when it’s a mouse click, it’s extremely easy,” he continues. “For 30 years we’ve been doing merge/purge and target marketing. This is untarget marketing. This is getting data back on the 99% of consumers who don’t respond [to a mailing].”

If a marketer supplies Earth Class Mail with an image of its direct mail piece, the company can go in and see everybody who received it and what they did with it, creating a demographic profile of the type of person who responded.

Forty-one percent of the site’s access is overseas, from both expatriate consumers and foreign businesses who use the company to help streamline their U.S. business dealings. Small businesses also use the service as a way to receive orders in a central location.

W

Read more on Earth Class Mail

For the latest postal news, visit http://directmag.com/legal/postal/.