Justin Jackson

Passing the I Test

Services that provide basic cleansing of data and how they impact your marketing efforts.

Making the most of one to one marketing efforts means including integrity in your decisions.  Treat customers and prospects with integrity when you communicate with them.  Treat your data with integrity when you cleanse and manipulate it.  Treat your business with integrity when considering your vision and goals.

The first step in passing the I Test begins with address hygiene services, commonly referred to as address integrity services.  The National Change of Address service is the most well known and most powerful service available.  The NCOA database is built and managed by the United States Postal service.  The USPS regulates matching logic when processing against the NCOA file.  The NCOA file contains more than 155 million records within a rolling 48-month time frame.  Updates are made to the NCOA file on a weekly basis.

One in five Americans will move each year, a staggering number when you consider the impact on 20% of your customer file.  Not knowing where you customer resides has a dual impact.  First, your piece isn’t delivered where it is supposed to be, and you may miss out on an order, and second, your piece ends up in the hands of the new resident, who is left wondering why you are mailing them at all.  Using the NCOA file will alleviate both concerns.  The USPS has legislation in place to require all First Class and Standard mail to be processed through NCOA, a move update service like ACS, Address Correction Service, or be labeled as OCO, Or Current Occupant, within 95 days of the mail date.  This rule will be in place by November 23rd of 2008.

The USPS has also required LACS, Locatable Address Correction Service, to be run in conjunction with NCOA processing.  LACS translates the Rural Route addresses that exist on many current customer files, into standardized 911 Emergency addresses.  LACS also updates street name changes and PO Box renumbering changes.

Utilizing these basic postal offerings can help many mailers with the basics.  Both services impact delivery but also impacts matching within a merge purge or data append service.  When it comes to integrity, the basics play a role.  Make the I Test a part of every mailing.

Article Tags: Ncoa File

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