Keeping your mailing data clean
Keeping your data ready for mailing is time-consuming and takes dedication. You don't have to do all of this alone. Use services offered through NPC and the United States Postal Service (USPS) to eliminate duplicates, update addresses, and help ensure delivery.
- Check for Complete Addresses -
- Is any component of the address missing? A missing street number, city, state, or zip code will affect efficient delivery.
- Verify Key Data Fields for Accuracy -
- Two primary areas of mistakes are in the name and the state or province code. Use salutations for names; make sure they are properly spelled, and punctuation is entered correctly. This is necessary when personalization carries beyond address. Make sure state and province codes are correct. Many are very close and are often mistaken for one another. For example, ever have to stop and think, "Is Missouri 'MI'? Or is 'MI' for Mississippi?" (Neither! MI is Michigan.)
- Check for Placement of Secondary Data -
- Be consistent in the placing of secondary data such as suite numbers or apartment numbers, departments within a company or mail drop codes used in large companies, universities or government buildings. These can be with the address field or placed in a field of their own. Making these consistent will increase delivery accuracy. (If these are part of a single address field, take the length of a line into consideration. You don't want your address to be truncated or running too long on your envelope or label.)
- Duplication Elimination (Merge/Purge) -
- Several types of methods can be applied to eliminate duplicates in your data. For consumer or public files, three methods exist. (Business-to-Business lists require a different process. Please specify the type of list when you speak to NPC about this service.)
- Resident -
- removes all but one record from each address
- Household -
- removes all but one record with the same last name from each address
- Individual -
- removes duplicates with the same complete name from each address
- CASS Certification (Coding Accuracy Support System) -
- Running data through CASS Certification "scrubs" data to make it as deliverable as possible. This system looks at individual addresses and corrects or appends zip codes, plus-4 codes, and plus-2 delivery point barcodes. It also standardizes certain elements of an address such as abbreviations for words like "street", "avenue", and "boulevard".
- NCOA (National Change of Address) -
- This program is directed by the United States Postal Service. NCOA uses the change of address cards submitted to the USPS when you move. Your data files are matched against the "move" database. If a match is found, your data is updated with the new information. The move data is kept for a rolling 36 months.
