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ONE OF THE GREATEST obstacles to successful direct marketing campaigns is the difficulty of obtaining accurate mail data. Many of these challenges can be traced to the fact that traditional mover-correction systems use only address elements in the standardization and postal coding processes. Such methods can't revise records with missing or incorrect information like street and apartment numbers and directionals (North, South, etc.). Records without these elements often can't be ZIP+4 coded, so they cost more to mail and may not be deliverable.

Traditional systems use Coding Accuracy Support System (CASS) and National Change of Address (NCOA) processing. CASS validates addresses to the U.S. Postal Service's ZIP+4 file and applies carrier route and ZIP+4/delivery point barcode coding. NCOA updates data with the new addresses supplied to the USPS by movers. These processes have been adequate for years.

Fortunately for direct mailers, the address hygiene industry has undergone a quiet revolution recently thanks to systems that can correct 35% to 50% of the “bad” addresses that could not be validated by CASS. These corrections lower postage and improve change-of-address match rates by 10% to 25% or more.

Solutions of this kind use an occupant's name and address to make alterations that standard address hygiene products can't, such as adding missing apartment numbers and correcting street number transpositions. But why would a mailer take this extra step? One word: Deliverability.

Failure to maximize deliverability will surely eat away at a mailer's profit margin. For instance, a company might check its ZIP+4 coding percentage and find it's 98% — slightly better than the last campaign. Then the firm might recheck the NCOA^Link rate, which is arrived at by matching names and addresses on its mailing list to address changes filed by relocated postal customers. At 4%, this looks like it did last time. Is the list ready to mail?

Well…maybe. In an industry where fractions of a percentage point make a difference, it's important to analyze this closely. Consider the 98% ZIP+4 match rate. When an address record is validated by ZIP+4, it's categorized into one of 40-plus million USPS address ranges. Most relate to a block of addresses, or a block-face range.

A sample block-face range could be all the even-numbered addresses from 300 to 398 on Maple Street. While 310 Maple fits into this range, it doesn't necessarily mean the address exists, just that the block exists. The actual address might be 1310 Maple St. However, since it's “validated” by ZIP+4 software, it's considered deliverable.

What if the address is actually a sprawling apartment complex and the secondary number is missing? In ZIP+4 validation, it doesn't matter. In fact, the USPS will give an additional 6 to 8 cents off for applying the “correct” barcode. All of which means, in this case, the mail would likely be either undeliverable or delivered to the wrong person.

There goes the investment in sophisticated and costly modeling, segmentation and list rentals, along with the expense for the actual mail piece. It's not unusual for a file to have 10% or more such default matches. Some of these records are deliverable, others aren't. How many addresses had missing or incorrect elements? What percentage of the supposedly validated records matched to ZIP+4 default records?

What about the NCOA^Link update rate? The USPS requires mailers to use it every six months on first class mail and it certainly generates a positive return on investment in the form of enhanced response rates. So is a 4% update rate average? Probably not. According to the postal service, about 18% of Americans move annually, which means mailers should expect to match about 1.5% per month since the last NCOA^Link update.

In the direct mail industry, ultimate deliverability requires attention to such details and a strategy to manage inaccuracies at an affordable cost. That's where the new solutions come in. Here, data initially goes through a CASS-certified system, Delivery Sequence File Second Generation (DSF²) and NCOA^Link.

CASS standardizes and validates addresses at a block level. DSF² validates addresses at a delivery point level and appends information about each matched address record. It's also the best USPS tool for measuring accuracy and deliverability of address data.

Next, NCOA^Link updates movers' data based on the mail-forwarding orders they've filed with their local post offices. This creates reports to identify and profile current probable undeliverable-as-addressed counts and establishes benchmarks to enable comparisons for the optimized process.

The key step: After the initial cleansing, records are sent through the address correction system to add and/or amend address elements and postal codes. Unlike USPS-based systems, these processes combine name data with address data to apply previously unobtainable corrections. The added elements result in higher ZIP+4 and DSF² match rates.

Often, half of the previously sufficient records can be ZIP+4 coded. With a second pass through NCOA^Link, these systems find and correct even more movers' data.

All remaining records without a new address from NCOA^Link are then matched to a privately sourced change-of-address system to increase the number of names of those who have moved. Often this provides 10% to 25% more movers over just one NCOA^Link pass.

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BOB GILLEN is a product manager for Acxiom Corp. in Conway, AR.