Standardization is Key
Our United States Postal Service (USPS) certified mail management
software matches your address data against the USPS standards for
delivery address, city, state, and ZIP codes. The corresponding
fields in your mail list are the key to increasing the deliverability
of your mail piece.
Mail lists contain fields of information required to have an item
delivered by the United States Postal Service. A basic mail list
includes a Name, Delivery Address, City Name, State Abbreviation,
and ZIP Code. More complex mail lists include additional fields
such as Company Name, Customer ID or Account Numbers, Alternate
Delivery Addresses (such as Apartment, Suite, or Mail code), Division
or Group Names, Job Titles, or Attention To lines.
Standardize the format of your list by including the same number
of fields in the same order for all addresses in your mail list.
For example, if any address in your mail list has a Company Name,
then all addresses in your list must have a Company Name field
(or column if you are using a spreadsheet to manage your list).
Leave the field blank if a particular address doesn't have a value
for the field (for example, if the address doesn't have a Company
Name). Finally, if your mail list includes international addresses, be
sure to include the Country Name in a separate field.
Organizing your mail list in this way allows our software to quickly
identify the information needed for merge/purge processing and
address standardization. Standardization is the key to increasing
the deliverability of your mail piece and taking advantage of lower
postal rates through automation.
Tell Us About Your List
We ask that you specify each field by name when providing a copy
of your mail list for processing. The simplest way to provide this
information is to include a record that contains the name of the
field as the data. This record of field names is known as the header
record. Databases (such as MS Access, dBase, or FoxPro) automatically
include a header record with the list.
Getting the Data to Us
We can process mail lists that are saved in several popular file
formats including MS Excel, MS Word, MS Access as well as database
files from dBase and FoxPro (with the .dbf file extension), and ASCII
data in comma delimited, tab delimited, fixed width,
or label image formats.
Our technology team has developed a sampler containing a basic
mail list with sample data in MS Excel, MS Word, MS Access, comma
delimited, tab delimited, fixed width, and label image formats.
You can modify the template to suit your particular list and use
it to store your mail list data. Click
here and select Save or Save As to download a copy of this .zip file.
We can accept your mail list on 3.5" diskettes, ZIP disks,
CDs, as an email attachment, or as a file uploaded to our secure FTP site.
