Lob’s New API Feature Increases Deliverability for Direct Mail

Lob, the direct mail automation company, announced the Lob Confidence Score, a new API feature that assesses mail deliverability. The Lob Confidence Score helps companies answer the question of “will my mail actually arrive at this customer address?” The Lob Confidence Score enhances Lob’s address verification API, which has been used billions of times since 2018.

Lob has delivered hundreds of millions of mailpieces in 2020. This new functionality leverages Lob’s extensive mail tracking data to create a score between 0-100 that predicts the likelihood of delivery for each address, allowing businesses to confidently increase their audience for direct mail campaigns without increasing return-to-senders.

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Undeliverable mail costs enterprises $20 billion a year. Currently, to determine if an address is deliverable, companies rely on USPS data that assesses the entered structure of the address. The problem is that this returns false negatives, causing businesses to fail to reach customers with critical mail and for consumers to miss mail they need. Lob pairs USPS information with its own data from tracking and scanning successful mail deliveries. With the Confidence Score, businesses can accept addresses that were previously returned as undeliverable and reach more customers without wasted costs.

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Lob automates direct mail for more than 7,000 businesses. The company sends millions of pieces of direct mail per month and has processed billions of addresses through its Print & Mail and Address Verification APIs. One in four households in the U.S. have received mail generated through its platform. That mail tracking data feeds the Confidence Score algorithm to tell companies how deliverable that address is. With each piece of mail, Lob sends and tracks, the machine learning algorithm improves the accuracy of the Confidence Score.

“This year has proven that mail still very much matters to Americans,” said Harry Zhang, cofounder. “Verifying addresses is a seemingly small step that makes a big difference in outcomes—for consumers that need their mail and for businesses that are spending millions of dollars on undeliverable mail and packages. Our intuitive Confidence Score applies Lob’s millions of pieces of data points from real-world mail delivery to help companies understand address quality rather than relying solely on postal data.”

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