Catching undeliverable direct mail before it leaves your door is one of the easiest and most effective ways to save on postage and production costs and also help reduce the impact on the environment. Before your next mailing, follow these three simple address management steps, courtesy of Greg Brown, marketing director at Melissa Data (melissadata.com):

1. Clean it up or clear it out. Data quality and mail preparation software is available to help you identify bad addresses. That’s your heads-up to pull these records from your database and possibly correct the faulty address elements.

2. Get a move on. An estimated 43 million Americans pick up and move every year. The U.S. Postal Service maintains a database, called NCOALink, with approximately 160 million records representing 48 months of permanent address changes. You can submit your direct mail marketing mailing list or contact database to USPS-licensed vendors that match your addresses against the database of individuals, families, and businesses that have filed a change of address with the postal service.

3. Eliminate duplicates. Duplicate creative direct mail pieces not only annoy recipients, they also water down your message, dampen your credibility, and create a tremendous waste of paper, postage, and printing costs. Duplicates also affect the accuracy of customer response analysis and ROI. Your best investment is to take advantage of data hygiene products or services coupled with merge/purge processing to first validate and standardize addresses and eliminate duplicate records.

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