Your mailing list is a valuable asset. Keeping your mailing list up-to-date means that your information is actually reaching your customers or prospects. It also saves you money in printing, mailing and postage costs as you are not paying to print and mail to an undeliverable address.
Less than 15% of companies keep their customer databases up to date and do not actively communicate with their customers
Here are three of the tools we use to ensure your lists are up to date.
CASS Certified ZIP+4 and Delivery Point Validation
A mandatory requirement for automation discounts, CASS Certified software standardizes an address using standard abbreviations, correct spelling and proper format. DPV verifies that an address has an actual point of delivery.
According to the experts at the United States Postal Service, the purpose of the CASS system is “to improve the accuracy of delivery point codes, ZIP+4-codes, 5-digit ZIP codes, and carrier route codes on mail pieces
This is the first step in cleaning your list. Passing your list through CASS will kick out any addresses that may not get delivered because there is something wrong with the address.
** Please note that your list must be CASS certified within 180 days of the mail date and within 90 days for carrier route discounts. Basic presort discounts require the mailing list be zip code verified within one year of the mail date.
Duplicate Elimination
Eliminate costly duplicate records from a single list or across multiple lists and reduce the steady erosion of your organization’s credibility among customers or donors.
NCOA – National Change Of Address
NCOA is a certification that meets the move update requirement set forth by the United States Post Office. We compare your mailing list to a database of more than 160 million address changes filed by postal customers who made a permanent change of address with the USPS. This change of address is maintained in the NCOA database for 48 months. Whenever a name and address from a mailing list matches one of NCOA’s old addresses, it is updates your database with either a forwarding address or notification when there is no address available.
- Over 17% of Americans change their address annually
- 45 million people move each year
- Approximately 1 out of every 6 families move every year
The value of a “clean” mailing list is truly a no-brainer. It will save you in final cost and get the material to the party intended. We recommend that you process the list for address changes at least once a year – but it is more efficient if you do it every time you mail.
Take a look at this number:
- If you have a 1-million piece mailing and 10% are not delivered due to bad addresses then you have essentially lost $23,000 (100,000 pieces of mail x $.24/each bulk rate postage.
The best advice is to not cut corners and ensure that your mailing lists are as up-to-date as possible before delivering to the post office.
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