Cleaning up your in-house mailing list can feel like a chore. Like ridding your closet of outdated or ill-fitting clothes. Or looking for expired food cans in the cupboard.
But good addresses go bad, and that’s bad news for you. Sometimes your buyers move and don’t inform you. Sometimes they change jobs and the replacement doesn’t have the trust or history with your company that the previous employee did. Sometimes you have multiple accounts for the same individual. And sometimes buyers just no longer have an interest in or a need for your company. So why should you continue spending money on duplicate mailings or on people who won’t give you a return for your investment and time?
Cleaning your house list not only ensures that your promotions actually reach your customers, but it also means that it costs you less money to do it: you’re not wasting money to print and mail to an undeliverable address or uninterested party.
The easiest way to clean your house list? Enlist the help of a professional. Although you can manually comb through your database, looking for duplicate accounts, checking addresses, and trying to track down new addresses for mail that’s been returned, doing so could take weeks. Entrusting your list to a professional data-processing company not only saves you from that painstaking work in shorter order, but it also gets you a better list that will save you money at the post office.
Professionally maintained mailing lists—those whose addresses have been verified and standardized to U.S. Postal Service specification by CASS certification and updated according to the National Change of Address database—receive deeper postage discounts, eliminate costs associated with unmailable pieces, and experience higher delivery and response rates.
Take a cue from that stack of returned mail you have buried on your desk. Clean your list now—and frequently—to ensure a happy, healthier direct mail program.
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