What does a clean list mean? It means that the largest percentage of your addresses are deliverable by the United States Postal Service. If your list falls below a certain percentage, you will be charged a surcharge by the United States Postal Service. How does the USPS know if your list contains bad addresses. They have a system, called Merlin, that checks for address hygiene. The best way to clean up a mailing list is to run a NCOAlink update. NCOA stands for National Change of Address, it is the database that the USPS keeps, that has every address in the United States. Mailing companies, such as Burns, pays a license fee to be able to clean up our customer’s mailing list with the NCOAlink update software. If someone on your list has moved, there is a good chance that the NCOAlink update will provide us with the new address. The good news is that we offer this as a FREE service, for our customers. After the list is clean up by the software that we are using we get back codes to tell us why an address may not be deliverable. These are called Nixie codes.
Below is a chart showing what each Nixie code means.
After we clean up a customer’s list we send them the un-deliverable addresses with the Nixie codes so that they can see why they have a bad address. In some instances they can make changes and send back to us and they will pass the NCOAlink update and be able to mail.
Call me if you want to be insured that you list is cleaned up and that you get the best postal discounts available. Phyllis Burns – 865 584-2265 or email me at phyllis@burnsmp.com.
