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OK, it's time for a pop quiz. Can you tell me what facet of any direct mail pitch is sure to influence the response rate you get?

If you said “the address,” you're absolutely right!

Simply put, if the address is wrong, incomplete or unreadable (by humans or machines), there's a good chance your catalog or direct mail offer never will be delivered in the manner and to the person you intended. No matter how great the offer, regardless how creative the piece, if the mailing address is lacking in any way, your marketing effort will fail.

This is rule number one for any advertising or direct marketing approach that relies on mail to place a message before an audience: Mail's nature imposes unique requirements on users.

This is nothing new. You can say the same thing about other media. We all know that the ad you'd create for television wouldn't be identical to the one you'd prepare for radio, a newspaper, a magazine or a billboard.

Today, most mail is processed via automation. Consequently, there is more to “complete” addressing than just the human-readable part. Automatable mail requires that a perfectly accurate barcode be presented to a machine reader in precisely the place the reader expects it to be.

As the U.S. Postal Service continues to improve its automation technology, it will count on mailers to understand the need for placing this vital barcode and addressing information in a position on the mail piece designed to facilitate machine readability and processing.

Say this to many mailers and they begin to moan, “Aw, you mean you're going to stick that thing right where my art director has chosen to be most creative?” Increasingly, the answer may be yes.

My advice is, get used to it. For mail to have a chance in a competitive world, it must work as perfectly and cost-efficiently as possible. That is, of course, unless you like paying more for postage.

So if you rely on mail to bring your business the profits it hopes to achieve, be prepared to do whatever you can to facilitate mail processing, distribution and delivery.

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GENE A. DEL POLITO is president of the Association for Postal Commerce (PostCom) in Arlington, VA.