If you are blessed with a somewhat uncommon name like I am, you are used to seeing many creative spellings. In my case, Sheila is often transposed to Shiela or Shelia. I can live with that. And if someone sends me a letter with my name misspelled on the envelope, it will still get to me. But if someone sends me a letter with my street or city spelled incorrectly, or my zip code numbers transposed, there is a good chance that I will not receive it. Or recieve it. Or recevie it.

Companies spend a lot of time, effort and money to create good-looking printed materials to send to their customers and prospects. It’s worth taking a little more time and spending a little more money to make sure the addresses in your mailing list are correct. There are several ways to accomplish this, and the best solution for you may be to use one or a combination of them.

• Tie a zip code lookup table into your data entry applications. When the user enters a zip code, the city and state will fill in automatically. The user will notice any transposed zip codes and will be able to fix them right away. And since the city name is filled in automatically from a table, it will not be misspelled.
• Run your mailing list through a CASS certification process to verify, correct and standardize the addresses before mailing. Any mailing service provider should be able to do this for you. You can also ask your mailing service provider to run your list against the National Change of Address (NCOA) database, to get an updated address for anyone who has moved within the last four years. If you run your list through CASS and/or NCOA as part of a mailing, ask for the corrected addresses to be returned to you so that you can use them to update your database.
• Use returned mail pieces to update your mailing list. The yellow sticker attached to the piece will give you a new address, if one is available, or tell you the reason the mail could not be delivered.

When you have correct addresses in your mailing list, you can be confident that your important message is reaching all of your intended audience. And here’s a surprise: It won’t cost as much as you think. In fact, you can pay for it many times over with the savings gained from less wasted postage and printed materials. A zip code lookup table costs about $150 and a few hours of programming time; CASS certification costs about $5 per thousand addresses; updating a mailing list from returned mail can be done in-house or outsourced for an hourly data entry rate. DataWorks can help you with any or all or these functions, and we will be happy to help you determine the solution that best fits your needs.

Tags: Address Correction, Address Hygiene, Lehigh Valley, Mailing List Management