Orphan mail

And run your old or inactive records through the Postal Service's Locatable Address Conversion System (LACS), a DPV tool that helps determine if the business still exists but with a different address.

Or you can use an outside source to verify the address — a good idea especially for b-to-b mailers. “If a business moves, it's still going to want to get its mail,” Stangle says.

Wine merchant Geerlings & Wade segments the non-compliant names by recency, frequency, and monetary value, says director of consumer marketing Jake Hall. The ones that top breakeven, including the postage penalty, continue being mailed.

“For our best customers, we will go to increasingly expensive means to correct the address, like e-mail them, then follow up with a phone call, and then maybe send a postcard,” Hall explains.

Geerlings & Wade also tests lesser segments of non-qualified addresses to track any differences in response.

“In the past, I've seen non-zip+4 addresses perform better than so-called ‘good’ addresses, simply because they don't suffer the same mailbox glut as others,” Hall adds.

Yapuncich agrees with Hall. If all catalogers drop non-qualified addresses, few catalogs will reach rural areas where addresses may still include “rural route” and not even be compliant with LACS.

“If merchants all decide they aren't going to spend extra to mail to a non-qualified address, that means a lot of households in middle America won't be getting catalogs,” Yapuncich says. “You may get a better response if you mail to those addresses because no one else is reaching them. You may have to pay a premium to mail them, but you probably won't have a lot of competition.”

Only 60% of the households that move fill out a change of address form with the USPS. But every mover will go to their regular mailers to make sure they will still receive “wanted” mail, Stangle says.

Thus, he recommends segmenting non-compliant addresses and running a merge/purge against magazine subscription lists, utility bills and warranty cards.

Sometimes it's as simple as going to an online directory like whitepages.com or LinkedIn to correct respective b-to-c and b-to-b addresses. Better yet, if the phone number is included in the data, give the customer a call and ask if the address is correct.

But there's another problem as well: Not all bad addresses are caused by a business or household move, or an address that was updated by LACS. Sometimes they are due to simple data entry errors that put things out of whack.

Misspellings can make it through CASS, but Stangle says they are easy to fix. Sometimes it just takes some proofreading to correct the spelling of “Maiin St.” At other times, you may have to cross-check with another list to see if Bobby Jones lives at 101 or 103 Main St.

With that in mind, mailers such as Geerlings & Wade are investing in address verification software that will assist with corrections while the customer is still on the phone.

The USPS DPV database is loaded into the call-center software. So if an address is being entered incorrectly, it will be flagged. Then the operator can ask for verification.