The Inconvenient Truth about Unwanted-Mail Removal Services

By Ron Wiener, CEO, Earth Class Mail Corp.

Just about everyone complains that he or she gets too much “junk mail.” And everyone’s definition of the term varies by personal interests. One person’s junk mail is another’s beloved Sunday night bedtime-reading companion. The outdoorsman’s cherished Cabela’s catalog is junk mail to his wife, whose Pottery Barn catalog is junk mail to her husband.

The definition of junk mail is simple: Poorly targeted, unsolicited advertising mail is “junk” – to the unwitting recipient, to the shareholders of the company that sent it, and, most of all, to the environment. Various studies show that only 20-30% of junk mail gets recycled – most of it winds up in our landfills.

The problem is now more palpable than ever, as two recent trends have shown. First, U.S. residential mailboxes are now so oversaturated with competing pleadings for disposable income that marketers complain of ever-declining response rates, against a backdrop of ever-increasing postage rates. This economically lethal combination has led thousands of catalog companies and direct marketers to either go bankrupt or shift their advertising dollars to online channels instead.

Second, tens of millions of dollars of venture capital have flowed into a rapidly burgeoning junk-mail removal industry, whose companies include Greendimes.com, ProQuo.com, 41pounds.com, CatalogChoice.com, among others.

Every time one of these websites gets coverage on CNN or ABC News, the printing and postal industries reach for the defibrillator. Consumers have been signing up for these services by the millions, including the industry’s own “Mail Preference Service” operated by the Direct Marketing Association.

To be sure, these services do have a measurable impact on reducing consumers’ angst and increasing marketers’ profitability, but their own marketing messages regarding the environmental impact of junk mail – how signing up for their services will empower customers to save the environment one unsubscribed catalog at a time – are of questionable accuracy. As I’ll explain later, these services could well actually cause more junk mail to be generated, not less.

A spin cycle of mailing lists

To understand this issue we must first look at the root cause of so-called “junk mail.” Catalog companies grow by prospecting to potential new customers – in other words, renting mailing lists from other companies whose customers are demographically similar to ones they are trying to acquire.

 For example, if a marketer of luxury household items wants to expand its business, it may rent mailing lists from Neiman Marcus or Mercedes-Benz on the presumption that these companies’ affluent customers would also like to buy high-end merchandise to beautify their homes.

Mailing lists are always rented on a one-time-use basis and are always supplied directly to a bonded service bureau that will “merge/purge” the various rented lists and prepare them for the commercial printer or presort bureau to apply to the outgoing mail. The marketer who rents a mailing list never gets a copy of it. The only way that marketer gets to legally “own” any of the names on the list is when some of those prospects actually buy something from the marketer.

In a typical scenario, if a marketer rents 100,000 names from another marketer and gets 1,000 orders (a typical 1% response rate), the identities of the other 99,000 people who didn’t respond remain anonymous to the marketer.

If the list is “productive,” however – i.e., profitable to mail to – the marketer will rent it over and over again, never able to determine which names on those lists are “non-responders” on which it is wasting its money. And so that’s how a consumer winds up getting the same catalog month after month, year after year, even though he’s never ordered anything from the company.

Because of the revenue-protection scheme of the list-rental industry, your inbox gets stuffed with offers of no interest to you, at a great cost to marketers in printing and postage. The only beneficiary of this colossal inefficiency is the USPS.

This is also the reason that most requests to be removed from catalog mailing lists are either ignored by marketers or are ineffective. Unless you’re a direct customer of the marketer, your name won’t appear in its “house file” of customers, so it can’t remove your name from its databases.

The secret trick for being excluded from a company’s mailings is to demand to have your name added to its “suppression file,” so that it is not rented out again to other marketers.

Most people are aware of the federal Do Not Call registry, but they don’t know that similar protection against unwanted mail is offered by the United States Postal Service Regulations and Title 19, Section 3001 of the United States Code. If you want to make sure you get off a mailing list, cite this statute when sending in your request.

Also, tell companies that you do patronize not to rent your name to others. Some will honor the request, and some will not. Note: As with other federally mandated anti-pestering legislation, marketers are only required to honor your request for five years, so every five years you may need to repeat your campaign to get rid of unsolicited advertising mail.

Now, back to the “green” marketing messaging being used by the junk-mail removal services…

Addition by subtraction

Using one of these services to request removal of your name from marketers’ mailing lists will indeed result in reduced junk mail in your own mailbox. The marketers will appreciate your request because their campaigns will be more profitable if they remove prospects that they know for certain will never respond with an order. This merely redirects your copy of the catalog to some prospect who might be interested. This “untargeting” of specific recipients will result in higher response rates and thus higher profitability for these marketers.

But what does a marketer do with the higher profits? It plows the extra money into prospecting circulation growth! As the former CEO of two catalog companies, I can tell you that this is a cardinal rule of catalog management. Your aim is always to expand circulation (i.e., revenues) as much as possible while maintaining your net profit target.

So at the end of the day, if a marketer’s profitability is improved as a result of receiving thousands of unsubscribe requests from these junk-mail-removal services, it will reinvest the incremental profit into yet more printing and postage. These services – in truth – stimulate more junk mail, more paper manufacturing and printing that’s toxic to the environment, more carbon consumption in delivery of more catalogs, and more landfill usage.

Not only are these junk-mail-removal services convincing customers to sign up by making claims of environmental benefits, but in many cases their true business model is to turn around and get you to subscribe to new catalogs you aren’t already receiving, which creates yet more environmental impact.

I’m not advocating that these services discontinue – they do provide a valuable benefit to people who simply want to stop feeling put-upon by marketers who jam their mailboxes and recycling and trash bins with unwanted material. But I believe it is time that they stop promoting themselves as a way for consumers to “save the environment.” These companies, and the investors who back them, are leveraging the green fever that is currently rampant in our society, and are causing an even greater volume of unsolicited advertising mail to be generated.

How much more? The USPS volume of advertising mail in 2007 grew by more than one billion pieces compared with 2006 levels – totaling over 103 billion pieces for the year. And this increase occurred despite the recent postal-rate increase.

Direct-mail marketing still works or else marketers wouldn’t be funding it, so don’t expect it to go away any time soon. However, the rate of growth of advertising mail is declining as the dollars continue to shift into online marketing channels that are environmentally innocuous in comparison.

If you want to reduce the environmental impact of junk mail, then the two best things you can do are to 1) patronize your favorite merchants through their websites instead of calling, faxing or mailing in your order, and 2) use Earth Class Mail to receive all your postal mail online, and thus ensure that 100% of the mail you discard is securely recycled.

How to ‘turn off the tap’ on junk mail

Here are some quick tips for effectively cutting the vast majority of junk mail you receive:

• Go to the-dma.org and sign up for the Mail Preference Service, which allows you to remove your name from the mailings of DMA-member companies (nearly every major mailer is a member) that use this suppression database.

• Go to optoutprescreen.com to restrict your name from being rented by the major credit-reporting bureaus. This alone will typically reduce your junk mail by 20%, especially the credit-card and loan offers that create such a huge identity-theft risk. However, if you want to make sure the three major credit reporting bureaus do not rent your name out to any marketer, you’ll need to mail them a signed request, indicating your Social Security number (or account number) and your date of birth, to the following addresses:

Equifax Options
Equifax Marketing Decision Systems
P.O. Box 740123
Atlanta, GA 30374-0123

Experian (TRW)
Target Marketing Services Division
Attn: Consumer Opt-Out
P.O. Box 919
Allen, TX 75013

TransUnion
Name Removal Option
P.O. Box 97328
Jackson, MS 39288-7328

• If you do contact a specific marketer to get off its mailing list, always request to be added to its suppression file, not removed from its mailing lists. It’s always a good idea to cite the federal law requiring mailers to keep your name on a suppression file for five years. Be sure to include all the financial institutions you do business with, including your mortgage lender, credit card issuers, investment banks and savings banks.

Marketing database “compilers” get your name from a variety of sources, apply demographic overlays, and sell it over and over again to thousands of mailers. To have your name removed from these popular sources of rented lists, send a request to be added to their suppression files as well. Be sure to include any address at which you may have lived during the past five years:

Acxiom Corporation
Consumer Advocate
301 Industrial Blvd.
Conway, AR 72033
optout@acxiom.com

Haines & Co.
Criss-Cross Directory
Attn: Director of Data Processing
8050 Freedom Ave. NW
North Canton, OH 44720
800-562-8262

R. L. Polk & Co.
List Compilation
26955 Northwestern Highway
Southfield, MI 48034
810-728-7000

Dataquick
9620 Towne Centre Drive
San Diego, California 92121
800-888-4492

• So-called “saturation mail” addressed to “Current Resident” is delivered to every household on the carrier’s route. You can’t be removed from these mailing lists by requesting it of the USPS. You need to contact these companies directly:

Val-Pak Coupons, 800-676-6878
http://www.coxtarget.com/mailsuppression/s/DisplayMailSuppressionForm

Carol Wright, 800-67-TARGET
List removal: CWSupport@carolwrightgifts.com

Harte-Hanks (Pennysaver & Potpourri)
800-422-4116
Circulation
C/O Pennysaver
2830 Orbiter Street
Brea, CA 92821

Clipper Magazine
888-569-5100
Email: info@clippermagazine.com

Valassis Communications Inc.
888-241-6760

• To remove your name and address from sweepstakes mailings, contact these companies directly:

Publishers Clearinghouse
101 Channel Drive
Port Washington, NY 10050

Reader’s Digest
Reader’s Digest Road
Pleasantville, NY 10570

American Family Publishers
P.O. Box 6200
Tampa, FL 33662

• For businesses that want to get off of unsolicited advertising databases, contact the Dunn & Bradstreet Customer Service Center at 800-333-0505.

February 3, 2008 | Filed Under Earth Class Mail 

Comments

3 Responses to “The Inconvenient Truth about Unwanted-Mail Removal Services”

  1. Carolyn at GreenWave on February 4th, 2008 5:15 pm

    Ron –

    Thanks for the provocative post about junk mail and catalogs, and the handful of services working to stop the madness. I work with 41pounds.org, one of the organizations you mentioned. I’d like to clarify and comment upon a few things.

    First, 41pounds.org is not funded by venture capital. It was developed and funded by three brothers in the Detroit area. It is a nonprofit organization working diligently to stop their customers’ junk mail and catalogs. When a customer signs up for the service, 41pounds.org contacts 25-30 marketing companies, including the DMA and designated catalogs, to stop junk mail at the source.

    Another part of 41pounds.org’s mission is to support a healthy environment and healthy communities. 41pounds.org donates more than 1/3 of its fees to partner nonprofits such as StopGlobalWarming.org, American Forests and Habitat for Humanity chapters.

    It’s true – anyone can do the work themselves to stop their junk mail — but that takes a lot of time. You helpfully provide some of the steps in your blog – a lot of organizations to contact, plus catalogs. For $8.20 a year, many people prefer to have 41pounds.org do the work for them. (I personally signed up for the service, and it reduced my junk mail to almost zero.)

    You make great points about the direct mail industry and catalog marketing – and their goal of expanding their customer base and sales revenue. Yet, we strongly believe in consumer-driven change. Given the urgent environmental challenges facing us all today, we believe now is the time to raise our voices collectively to stop our own junk mail and let marketers know that direct mail and mass catalog mailings are not appreciated. We recognize that the 41pounds.org service (and others like it) are not the sole answer to the junk mail deluge – or to the planet’s challenges. But, together we can send an important signal to the marketing industry – and inspire change to greener, cleaner marketing.

    - Carolyn

  2. margotb on February 5th, 2008 2:01 pm

    Ron,
    This is all brilliant information, great post!

    http://www.stopthejunkmail.com is another service much like the other companies you mention who help consumers eliminate unwanted junk mail. We have been around since 2001 and our mission is to protect consumer privacy and help consumers reduce the clutter in their mailboxes. We plant a tree in order to replace the paper wasted by the catalogs they receive, simple.

    The information which you have gathered over years of being in the industry is not known by a majority of the population. It is also hard to find in many cases that is why we consider stopthejunkmail.com be a resource for sharing this information among consumers rather than an environmental company.

    Yes, absolutely you can do it yourself (and we give advice just like you regularly) but we liken it to the experience of changing the oil in your car, would you like to get down under your car yourself or get a garage to do it for you?

    Margot

  3. Ron Wiener on February 6th, 2008 5:20 pm

    Carolyn - thanks so much for your comments. Clearly all parties involved - marketers, consumers, our planet - will benefit from an open, frank dialog like this.

    I want to be clear, though, that Earth Class Mail’s position is not anti-mailer. Even Greenpeace and Patagonia use direct mail to get donors and sell products. The key is *responsible* marketing and maiing practices. We all share the frustration, as consumers, of feeling “put upon” when we empty our mailboxes of catalogs we’re not interested in. Your services help the consumer get rid of unwanted mail and the marketer to stop spending money on unproductive, wasteful copies of their catalog. But there is much more to the story.

    The conundrum is that the more effective your service is, and the more consumers take action to get their names removed from mailing lists, the more profitable the mailers become - and the more mail volume is generated in the future. I fully support efforts to get people to recycle more and waste less paper, but that is wholly unrelated to reducing your J-mail. What I was trying to point out in my blog article - the key point - is that claims like those found on http://www.41pounds.org/impact/ are potentially misleading consumers to believe that if they unsubscribe from a catalog mailing that they are doing something proactive to save the environment. No trees, water, oil or global warming emissions will be saved as a consequence of someone getting themselves off a mailing list.

    To the contrary. Improving the response rate of catalog campaigns by removing yourself as a non-respondent will only lead to the catalogers printing and mailing more copies of the following issues as they plow their improved profits into higher circulations. I don’t think 41pounds.org would lose a single customer if they were less overt with their claims of saving the environment and their villification of catalog marketers. Most consumers are quite naive about how catalog marketing economics actually work and so it is easy to convince them that they are helping the environment by getting their names off of mailing lists, but as a matter of truthful disclosure, this is not what actually happens in the real world, in the real ecology, in the real economy.

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