Why NCOA is vital

Incorrect mailing list addresses are expensive and wasteful, for you as well as USPS. If you’re handling automated direct mail, you probably know that more than 45 million US families, individuals and businesses change their addresses each year, out of more than 145 million deliverable addresses on file with USPS, and more than 800,000 change-of-address records are added to the change of address database each week. In addition, numerous changes are made each month in the Zip+4, street name, house number and other postal delivery designations, requiring DPV matching. Direct mail sent to out-of-date or incorrect addresses arrives late or never arrives at all, returning to mail senders as "undeliverable as addressed", "addressee not known", or other designations showing it was neither delivered nor forwarded.

So there's no such thing as a "clean" mailing list, unless you processed it through a system such as ours, no more than a week or so before you ran your mailing from it. And this is all the more reason you ought to update the addresses of all your direct mail files, including those used for periodicals as well as those mailed at First-Class Mail or Standard Mail postage rates. If you clean and update your lists this way, you not only will save a lot of money on otherwise wasted printing and postage, and you will know that your expected delivery postal delivery rate will be close to optimum.

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