Royal Mail will destroy undeliverable mail without return addresses
Howard Lake | 30 September 2004 | News
In a cost-cutting exercise the Royal Mail has announced that, from 4 October 2004, it will no longer attempt to return undeliverable mail that does not have an external return address on it.
If your direct mail appeals do not include an external return address (ERA) on the back, then from this week onwards you might never find out that some of your appeals have not been delivered.
Until now the Royal Mail handles 21 million items of mail that are marked return to sender but which don’t have a return address on them. It has always tried to deliver them by getting them opened at a dedicated sorting centre to see if the contents could indicate a sender. From 4 October that service will cease.
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The Royal Mail says that the best place to put an ERA is on the back of your mail, in the middle at the top, no bigger than 70mm x 30mm.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.