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 negative impact on the environment. As you coordinate your next direct mail marketing effort, consider these three simple address management steps, courtesy of Greg Brown, marketing director at Melissa Data (www.melissadata.com):

1. Clean it up or clear it out. Data quality and mail preparation software is available that can 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 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 direct mail advertising pieces not only annoy recipients, they also water down your message, dampen your credibility, and create tremendous waste in 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 validate and standardize addresses and eliminate duplicate records.

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