Data Hygiene Archives

Do a Deep Dive Into Your Acquisition Merge/Purge Reports This Summer!

It’s Acquisition Season. Do you really know what’s going on in your merge/purge process?

Avoid looking only at your bottom line mailing quantity when you receive merge/purge reports from your data partner.

Instead, understand the merge process, analyze the details and dynamics of your data, and discuss the findings with your internal team, your data provider and your list broker. This will help you make much better business decisions about your prospecting campaigns.

Check out MMI’s “Demystifying Merge Purge Processing Reports” on demand training to get a thorough explanation of every merge purge report, plus valuable insights, testing ideas and red flags to watch out for from our expert trainer Marvin Dawson. So much learning in just 50 minutes!

We’ve also put together this Acquisition Data Merge Purge Reports Checklist to help you dive deeper into your merge/purge process:

List of Lists: Documents all files received, quantities declared, and file conversion input and output statistics. Includes all lists in the merge: house files, rental lists, exchange lists, and suppression files. Look for significant variance between ordered and received quantities.
List Hygiene Report: Usually all lists from the List of Lists will appear here, unless mailer specifies that certain files do not go through hygiene processing: lapsed donors, active donors, non-donor house files, outside prospect lists. This reports provides hygiene stats of individual lists.
List Processing Report: Shows you what names were dropped prior to the merge. Review reject categories to make informed decisions about dropping names for future mailings. Drop categories can include: Deceased, NCOA, Prison Addresses, No ZIP+4/No ZIP, Unique ZIPs, Business Addresses (with or without individual name), Temporary Moves, Disaster Areas, Profanity/Buzzwords, and Vacant Lots. Are any of these categories higher or lower than you anticipated?
Merge/Purge Summary: Look for unusually high number of drops. Are the percentage of names kept as you expected? Look for unusually high (or low) hits against another list or suppression file. Examine individual list information if you see something out of the norm.
Match Analysis Matrix: This report shows the interaction between lists by percentage of matches and quantity of matches. Helps you understand the lists that have high percentages of overlap as well as lists that don’t overlap much at all.
Multi-Buyer Summary: Multi-Buyer names appear on more than one acquisition list and typically perform better than individuals who appear on only one list. How are you going to cultivate them?
List Broker Report: This report reflects all processing from the receipt of files through the merge/purge un-duplication process. Shared with your list/data brokerage partner to show input and output detail of each list for campaign reporting and future list planning.
Counts by Package/Source Code: Unique source codes are assigned to each list and can be created for each package/list combination to precisely track results.

Merge/purge processing is a critical part of your donor prospecting strategy, so dive in!

Start by watching “Demystifying Merge Purge Processing Reports” on demand training featuring Marvin Dawson’s not-to-be-missed Pro Tips!

Contact us if you have any questions about your merge/purge process, or if you need help with your next acquisition campaign!

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Don’t Let Bad Data Ruin Your Clever Creative

I recently received this mailing from my local Toyota dealership.

It uses visually interesting techniques and a fresh messaging approach along with highly personalized data.

The outer envelope features a realistic faux handwriting font in blue ink, and a slightly askew stamp. The back flap contains a return address but no name. These techniques increase “open-ability” – the letter looks personal and there’s some mystery around the sender.

Inside is a one page Microsoft Outlook-style email message with “URGENT: Exclusive Offer for Polly” in the subject line. The email is from the general manager of the dealership to a team member about me and my 2017 Toyota Tacoma and how the dealership should pay me top dollar for my truck, with an urgent tone.

It’s fun reading an email about yourself that’s not addressed to you. A yellow sticky note with the realistic blue ink handwriting “Polly, Please call me!” is attached to the email print out.

The creative nails it – clever, fresh, a quick read with a clear call to action.

BUT, the data is totally wrong:

“Please contact Polly and let them know that I want to purchase their 2017 Toyota Tacoma.”

OOF. I never owned the 2017 Toyota Tacoma. It was a leased vehicle. And I turned it in about a year ago, in June of 2020.

Wow! Such a great creative approach, that fails miserably due to really bad data. It doesn’t even make sense for me to respond since the offer is completely irrelevant to me.

Data hygiene and data accuracy are so critical to the success of your marketing campaigns. At MMI Direct, we focus exclusively on quality data hygiene and data processing services for our clients. We use 8 Levels of Data Hygiene tailored to your unique data set, strategy and goals.

Get your free MMI Direct “8 Levels of Data Hygiene” Checklist. And contact us at any time with your data hygiene questions. We want you to be successful!

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The Amazing Benefits of the USPS Address Change Service

Save money. Save time. Clean your address data. Reduce waste. Get your mail delivered faster.

Address Change Service

We’re very excited about the many benefits of the Address Change Service (ACS) offered by the Postal Service.

Here’s how it works: After your mailing drops, the USPS provides any change-of-address and other non-delivery information to you electronically. This reduces the amount of returned mail and the time and cost of dealing with manual address corrections to your database.

You save money by removing bad address records from your mailing lists. And corrected addresses can be delivered faster in upcoming mailings. A win-win for you and the USPS. ACS is very inexpensive and is available for First Class Mail, Parcels, Periodicals and Marketing Mail.

Address Element Correction

Address Element Correction (AEC) is an additional service which identifies addresses that are missing address elements or contain incorrect address elements that require additional handling. These problems can delay delivery or even make delivery impossible.

AEC corrects addresses through computer-automated processes and can involve evaluation by local delivery offices if needed. Bad addresses are turned into accurate addresses (complete and standardized for full automation) or identified as potentially undeliverable. This service is available for a modest fee.

How a Nonprofit Uses ACS and AEC

Our client has a large volume, national direct mail program with over 20 mailings per year. Every year, they use ACS on four renewal mailings to keep their donor address data as accurate as possible. As mailing results trickle in over a 12-week period, the USPS sends our client a weekly electronic report with change-of-address information and other reasons for non-delivery. These updates are then made to their donor database.

MMI sets up the specific IM barcode on each mailing that provides the instructions to the USPS to perform the ACS process. MMI then assists with the back and forth exchange of data between our client, their data management partner and the USPS, making the process efficient and easy for our client.

We also advise on which mailings are the best candidates for using ACS. For example, for this client, we recommended that ACS is especially effective for mailings further out from their NCOA processing date. This way, more potential address changes are captured during this additional correction process.

This client also uses the Address Element Correction (AEC) service five times per year to fix questionable addresses that have inaccurate or missing elements.

Several thousand records each year are either corrected or removed from our client’s mailings through these automated services – saving money, avoiding time-intensive manual processes, and eliminating waste. And corrected addresses get delivered without delays.

ACS and in some cases AEC services are beneficial to both large and small mailers. Setting up ACS and AEC with the USPS can seem a bit intimidating. And the backend operations of updating your CRM systems may seem challenging too.

MMI Direct can work with you to come up with the best approach for your team, processes and systems. We’re here to help! Contact us today to get started.

Larry Bettinger is Director of Data Processing at MMI Direct. Over the past 30 years Larry has developed a deep expertise in USPS data hygiene products and services. He assists our clients in setting up data hygeine protocols to maximize mail delivery and control expenses.

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Top Causes of Bad Data & the Red Flags to Avoid

Maintaining excellent data hygiene is an ongoing process that requires constant vigilance.

Here are three areas where you can proactively improve your organization’s data quality:

1. Rented lists – Responders to acquisition mailings subsequently get added to a donor database. Make sure all merge/purge processing uses the highest quality, most complete set of hygiene products. That way, responders will be coming on to the file at the cleanest addresses possible.
2. Data Entry – When data is manually entered into a database system, make sure input fields include standardization rules allowing only valid data types.
3. Audit all platforms your organization uses to collect information from supporters, donors and customers to ensure standardization rules are applied here too: website sign-ups, survey forms, webinar registration forms, whitepaper download forms, canvassing sign-up forms, event and auction registrations, volunteer registrations, among others.

Watch out for these red flags during every merge/purge process

Data hygiene is particularly critical during merge/purge processing, when many different internal and external list sources are combined and optimized for a donor or customer acquisition campaign.

QC your data with detailed list hygiene reports to uncover anything that doesn’t make sense. Highlight suspected errors to investigate further.

bad data red flags

Examples of suspicious data include:

- Hotline names (donors or customers who have donated or purchased within the last three months) with unusually high percentages of National Change of Address (NCOA) database matches.
- A high number of address standardization conversion rejects. Find out why.

TIP: It’s best to allow potential data errors to survive the conversion process so they can be corrected during the data hygiene process.

- Zero matches in the merge/purge.
- Zero hits on the NCOA database.
- High NCOA hit rates on Family lists. Make sure only Family moves were provided. NCOA includes three types of moves: Individual, Family and Company. Family lists for NCOA should only match to Family moves.
- Family lists with any Proprietary Change of Address (PCOA) hits. PCOA matches only at the Individual level. Since there are no first names on a Family list then there shouldn’t be any PCOA matches.
- ZIP+4 addresses are less than 95% of the file, except for your undeliverable suppression files. Note that data gathered online may have questionable data quality, which can decrease the percentage of records getting a ZIP+4 assigned.
- Beware of drastic differences in net output percentages of a specific list between your current merge process and previous merges that used the same list source. This might signify a problem and should always be investigated.

TIP: Be sure to analyze the data hygiene of all individual lists included in a campaign. Issues might be hidden in a summary analysis that only covers the total mailing metrics.

Weird things do happen. We’ve seen cases of incorrect sorting of Excel spreadsheet data and separate house file data segments that mistakenly include duplicate data, and many other errors.

Make sure your data processing partner has thorough quality control processes and reporting in place to identify and correct problems early, before they negatively impact your campaigns.

We’d love to answer any questions you may have about data hygiene best practices. Contact us today!

Senior Account Director Ross Fate has 21 years of direct marketing experience, with 18 of those years at MMI Direct. Ross works directly with many MMI clients on their ongoing data processing and merge purge projects. He also leads the onboarding of all new clients, where he focuses on ways to enhance their overall merge purge process. Ross also serves as an expert resource for our nonprofit clients anytime they need assistance with their data.

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8 Levels of Data Hygiene Make Your Campaigns Great!

A solid data hygiene program will enhance your campaign results in a variety of ways including:

Reduced postage rates
Faster delivery
Less undeliverable mail
Less waste
Save on printing & mailing costs
Increased response rates

With MMI Direct, you get 8 levels of meticulous data processing:

CASS – Coding Accuracy Support System Certification improves address accuracy.
NCOA – National Change of Address keeps your direct mail list up-to-date with the 14% of Americans who move each year.
PCOA – Proprietary Change of Address finds people who move who don’t file a change of address notice with the USPS.
Deceased Records Processing – Determine what makes sense for your organization and specific mailings.
Prison Suppression – Unlikely to become donors or customers, these addresses are typically omitted from mailings.
DMA Do Not Mail Preference (Pander) File – People who have directed the DMA to remove their names from direct mail lists should be omitted from acquisition mailings.
Profanity Suppression – Screens out addresses containing inappropriate words or phrases.
Donor File Dedupe – Identifies duplicate and potential duplicate records which can be consolidated or treated in the manner best determined by your organization.

Reach new levels of program performance with MMI’s thorough, highly customized data processing services. To explore how we can help make your campaigns even greater, please reach out.

Tags: data processing

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Data Hygiene Critical for Move Update Validation

The USPS will begin using a new Move Update validation process which could impact your budget. It allows them to better identify and penalize mailers who do not practice solid data hygiene. Here’s the breakdown of the changes.

What does this mean for mailers?

As you know, in order to receive postal discounts, the records on your mailing list must have gone through a data hygiene process called NCOA (National Change of Address) no longer than 95 days prior to your mail date. This helps the post office better manage their resources by reducing non-deliverable mail and the time-consuming task of forwarding and/or returning or trashing mail that cannot be delivered to the intended recipient. Move updates must be done for both Marketing Mail (formerly Standard) and First Class mail.

Nothing new there, so what’s changing?

Well, the USPS is changing the validation method used to determine compliance with Move Update –Mailpieces are scanned using Mail Processing Equipment and each mailing’s scores are maintained on a Mailer Scorecard. These results are aggregated across the calendar month and are measured against the established thresholds. Any COA errors exceeding the threshold, which is an error rate of 0.5%, will be assessed a Move Update assessment fee.

What does this mean for you?

In order to keep your error score down, it’s important to keep up with your data hygiene protocols and process them through the NCOA hygiene in the prescribed time frame.

Managing how your data is in your record will also help. Small things like ensuring your recipient name reads FIRST NAME/LAST NAME vs. LAST NAME/FIRST NAME will greatly decrease your error rate.

If you need assistance with any data hygiene or ensuring your Mailer Scorecard is within USPS thresholds, please reach out to us – we’d be happy to help.

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How to Handle Addresses with Questionable Delivery

What should you do with records that are flagged as potentially undeliverable during the CASS Certification process or while being run through the National Change of Address (NCOA) database? It depends upon the type of error that CASS or NCOA identifies

Addresses with Questionable Delivery

CASS Rejects and NoPlus4 Records: If there’s a major problem with the records – there’s no street address or the zip code is in the wrong state – it should be removed from the mailing. However, if the zip code is in the right city but CASS couldn’t append the zip+4 code, don’t automatically drop the record; the USPS postmen and postwomen tend to be very knowledgeable about their areas and may well know where to deliver it. Look at the flags or footnotes CASS appended to your file and choose the records to drop based on the severity of the error CASS noted. You can also mail these records under a separate code in order to test the responsiveness to your particular appeal or offer.

Nixies: There are two types of nixies and they each should be dealt with separately.

An “NCOA nixie” is someone who filled out a change of address form with the U.S. Postal Service but did not provide a forwarding address. You may be able to identify a forwarding address for some of these NCOA nixies through a Proprietary Change of Address (PCOA) database, but those who do not come up should be dropped from your mailing as they will not be delivered.
A “potential nixie” is someone who resides on the NCOA database and during the matching process the match wasn’t exact enough to provide a new address but was close enough to consider they may have moved. The USPS footnotes these potential nixies so you can determine the circumstances that caused them to land in this category and you also may pick up some forwarding addresses through the PCOA process.

What to do with your remaining potential nixie addresses? In order to make a good business decision regarding whether to mail these names or not, you will need to test them. Mail them and track their responsiveness. Most of our clients have determined there is value to mailing these names, but only your results will tell you the best way to deal with potential nixies.

Feeling a bit confused about the many decisions that managing your mailing list requires? You are not alone! If you’d like to put our decades of data hygiene experience to work improving your direct mail’s ROI, please call John Bell at (310) 372-9010.

Want more than a cookie cutter approach? MMI Direct dives deep into your data
to determine how best to optimize your list and maximize your direct mail ROI.

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Save Money by Not Mailing to Certain Addresses

One of the best ways to increase the return on investment of your direct mail is to cull certain types of addresses that are unlikely to be responsive from your list. While there are undoubtedly businesses that would find it profitable to mail to one or more of the following categories of addresses, most will not. These are the types of addresses we almost universally recommend excluding from a mailing not mailing to certain addresses

Jails or Prisons: There are few organizations for whom prisoners are likely customers or donors.
Military: Because of the likelihood they may be stationed overseas or living on a ship for extended periods, military personnel with APO or FPO addresses are typically excluded from mailings.
Nursing Homes: Residents of nursing homes are often not in a position to decide on a purchase or to make a donation.
Trailer Parks: If your product is priced higher than a resident of a trailer park is likely to be able to afford, you may want to omit such addresses from your mailing list.
Vacant Lots: Mailing to an address where the house is unoccupied and there is no forwarding address rarely makes sense. If there is no house or other structure on the property and you’re not a builder, investor or real estate agent, it’s hard to imagine that mailing to such an address will pay out.
Disaster Areas: If an area has recently been hit by a natural disaster, you should strongly consider either postponing the mailing or excluding the area from your mailing. Not only are any remaining residents likely to be focused on basic survival issues, but mail delivery is often suspended for extended periods following major disasters.
Addresses That Contain Profanity or Buzz Words: Disgruntled people will sometimes add an offensive address to a list for the purpose of angering the recipient. MMI has been continually updating a special data file designed to screen out addresses containing inappropriate words and phrases for 15 years.
5- or 6-line Addresses: Unusually long addresses are often chopped off on the envelope, causing the mail piece to become undeliverable. Even if your mailing can accommodate them, you may want to exclude such addresses if individuals in large companies are not part of your target market.
DMA Pander: People on the DMA Pander list have asked the Direct Marketing Association to remove their names from direct mail mailing lists. We strongly recommend that all such records be removed from an acquisition list.

Fortunately, data processing companies are able to identify each of these categories of addresses so that unprofitable addresses can be easily culled from your list prior to mailing.

There are other types of addresses that may or may not make sense for you to mail to depending upon your target audience and whether the mailing is to your house list or an acquisition list. We’ll cover these types of addresses (including deceased records and addresses with questionable delivery) in separate blog posts.

If you’d like to learn more about how MMI Direct can help you make your mailings more profitable, please call John Bell at (310) 372-9010 or let us know how to contact you.

Want more than a cookie cutter approach? MMI Direct dives deep into your data
to determine how best to optimize your list and maximize your direct mail ROI.

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Best Practices for Handling Deceased Records

Should you continue to mail to previous contributors who’ve been flagged as deceased? The answer to this question is more complex than you might think

Deceased Records

It is very important to be sensitive to the wishes of the grieving family members. If a family member has contacted your company to ask that no further mail be sent to the deceased, offer your condolences and immediately remove them from all future mailings.

You should also periodically match your file against one or more of the databases that contain reported deceased records. However, in this instance, it may not be a good idea to just remove these records from your house list. The surprising reality is that mailings to deceased individuals often have a solid response rate. Perhaps the surviving spouse wants to continue to contribute to the organizations the couple used to support together, or perhaps the record was incorrectly flagged as deceased.

Rather than removing any records flagged as deceased, it is usually a good idea to test the response you receive when mailing to this group of records. If you have not been automatically flagging such records up to this point, the easiest way to test this is to look at the results of one of your recent mailings. Was the return rate from mailing to this segment acceptable? If so, continue to mail to this group and retest periodically.

If there ceases to be a response to your mailings at some point, it is appropriate to flag these records and eliminate them from future mailings. We do not typically recommend including these records in a future donor reactivation campaign.

Best practices for rented acquisition lists are different. Since the family has no prior relationship with your organization, mailing to records flagged as deceased on one of these lists is less likely to be productive. For this reason, most of our clients automatically cleanse such names from the acquisition list. However, because you have no idea how detailed the update processes are for a rented list, you may want to also periodically test this decision.

Finally, you may want to consider testing “To the Family Of” in the beginning of the name field for records you believe are accurately flagged as deceased to which you plan to continue to mail.

Want more than a cookie cutter approach? MMI Direct dives deep into your data to determine how best to optimize your list and maximize your direct mail ROI.

Tags: data hygiene, database management, deceased records

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Should you use PCOA to clean your direct mail list?

The U.S. is a very transient country. With over 11% of all Americans moving in a typical year, keeping your direct mail list up-to-date is an ongoing challenge.

If you’re regularly mailing solicitations, newsletters or other pieces to a large list, you are undoubtedly already running your list through the USPS’s National Change of Address (NCOA) database. Not only does this cut down drastically on the number of undeliverable pieces you’re sending, but having processed your list through NCOA within 95 days of a mailing qualifies it for reduced postage rates.

An unfortunate fact, however, is that as many as 40% of Americans who move don’t bother to file a change of address notice with the USPS. They may have forgotten or they might have consciously decided not to do so in order to avoid creditors or cut down on unsolicited mail. But even those who didn’t change their address with the post office probably did notify their cell phone company, cherished magazines, and other companies they didn’t want to lose touch with.

A consortium of these organizations banded together in 1995 to share this information with each other and make the data available to services like MMI Direct. It is definitely worth testing whether running your list through the Proprietary Change of Address (PCOA) database pays out in terms of higher returns on your mailings. Fortunately, while PCOA processing used to cost several times more than NCOA, PCOA’s cost has dropped substantially in recent years.

Assuming the benefits of PCOA do pay out for your list, you then need to determine how frequently you should use it. Relocation rate is heavily dependent upon age — Americans in their twenties move nine times more frequently than those in their seventies, for example. It is also heavily dependent upon income, with almost twice as many Americans earning less than $5,000 a year moving in 2012 (13%) compared to those with an annual income of over $100,000 (7%). So it may make sense for managers of lists consisting primarily of older, wealthier donors to run their full house list through PCOA far less frequently than a company whose target audience is young gamers.

You should also consider if there are specific segments of your list that should be updated more frequently than the list as a whole. For example, you may want to run lapsed contributors through PCOA every six months to help you reconnect with individuals who’ve previously shown their willingness to support you.

Finally, an important question to consider is whether to update address data for active donors in your database if PCOA indicates they’ve moved. No process is error-free and, if someone has donated to you recently, you may have more accurate data than that in a compiled database.

Figuring out how to optimize your list is challenging. If we can help you in any way, please don’t hesitate to call (410) 561-1500.

Want more than a cookie cutter approach? MMI Direct dives deep into your data
to determine how best to optimize your list and maximize your direct mail ROI.

Tags: pcoa, proprietary change of address

Data Hygiene

Do a Deep Dive Into Your Acquisition Merge/Purge Reports This Summer!

Don’t Let Bad Data Ruin Your Clever Creative

The Amazing Benefits of the USPS Address Change Service

Address Change Service

Address Element Correction

How a Nonprofit Uses ACS and AEC

Top Causes of Bad Data & the Red Flags to Avoid

Watch out for these red flags during every merge/purge process

8 Levels of Data Hygiene Make Your Campaigns Great!

With MMI Direct, you get 8 levels of meticulous data processing:

Data Hygiene Critical for Move Update Validation

How to Handle Addresses with Questionable Delivery

Save Money by Not Mailing to Certain Addresses

Best Practices for Handling Deceased Records

Should you use PCOA to clean your direct mail list?

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