Your campaign is only as good as your data, so to have a good campaign you will want good, clean data. Without clean data two things may occur:

  1. You will be mailing multiple pieces to the same address/individual. Even small variations in address formatting can cause your merge/purge to fail to catch duplicates.
  2. Your undelivered returns will be much higher. Postal services have become more strict in their addressing requirements.

Data hygiene can greatly reduce these issues. Below are five key features of data hygiene:

  • Address Formatting – Putting addresses into postal preferred formats is one aspect of data hygiene that is often overlooked. Some mailers believe that as long as it’s deliverable, that’s all that matters. However, correctly formatting the addresses will not only improve duplicate detection, it may also improve response rates – how confident in a company’s products/services would you be if they can’t even get your address correct?
  • Address Correction/Validation – While running your data through address correction/validation does incur additional costs, it does have cost-saving benefits. At a minimum it optimizes deliverability and duplicate detection, thereby reducing mailing costs. At a maximum, it is a required part of the postal presort process (necessary for postal discounts).
  • NCOA (National Change Of Address) – Even having perfectly correct addresses won’t matter if the recipient no longer lives there. Many postal authorities maintain a database of recent moves. Running your data against this database will help ensure you have to most up-to-date address for your prospects.
  • Deceased Suppression – Similar to an NCOA database, some postal authorities maintain databases of the recently deceased.
  • Do Not Mail Suppression – While typically a feature of the merge/purge process, suppressing undesirable prospects is also a part of data hygiene. Is your data file truly clean if it contains prospects that have no desire to receive your offers?

For more information, visit our Data Processing pages, or contact our Data Experts.