The age old question of whether to use address correction and validation is one of those great Direct Mail mysteries. Money, time, postal discounts, greater audience reach, and long-term benefit – all these factors can leave a mailer’s head spinning. Here are a few things to aid in deciding whether “to correct or not too correct…”

Cost is a huge factor. Let’s face it, address correction and validation is expensive. Or is it? The benefit of address correction and validation is that it translates to cleaner data. Cleaner data means only correct and valid addresses will be mailed, which means your mail piece is getting to your potential customer faster and your nixie returns are reduced. Postal discounts both reduce mailing costs and save time on delivery when it comes time to mail your offer. This holds especially true as postal facilities are becoming more and more automated and the neighborhood mail person is slowly becoming a character of history.

Your target countries play a key role in the address correction and validation decision. Countries such as Australia, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, and USA require some form of barcoding and/or postal sorting for bulk mail discounts (which means you need address correction and validation generate the barcode and sort coding).  When in doubt, contact us to see what country requirements you may have to meet.

This bringing us back to cost and cost savings. Unfortunately this is not necessarily a black and white issue, as the savings may not be straight forward or obvious:

On the savings side:

  • You can take advantage of postal discounts.
  • You reduce your mailing costs by only mailing ‘good’ addresses.
  • You can reduce list rental costs by deducting the ‘bad’ addresses from the rental quantity.

On the cost side:

  • Address validation and correction is not free. Your service bureau costs could go up by half or more.
  • Despite not meeting postal requirements, the ‘bad’ addresses may actually still be deliverable and may still result in paid responses.
  • Your service bureau may have to outsource the correction and validation, which may add a day or two to your schedule.

If the savings outweigh the costs (or at least balance out), address correction and validation may be the way to go. At worst, your data will be cleaner and more accurate, which may save you money in the long run.