Mailing Address Correction | LetterStream Blog

How To Avoid Mailing Horrors With Address Cleanup

Nothing’s scarier than sending out an important batch of mail only to have half of it returned due to missing or outdated addresses! With that being said, Halloween seems like the perfect time to talk about the “phantom of the missing address”—a haunting error that disrupts businesses during peak mailing seasons. Sounds scary, doesn’t it? However, it doesn’t have to. With our dedicated address cleanup services, LetterStream helps keep these spooky mistakes out of your mailings. Our commitment to attention to detail, precision, and accuracy ensures that your communications reach their intended recipients without a hitch.

Speaking of attention to detail, it’s something we live by at LetterStream, both in our work and our workplace culture. This Halloween, we’re hosting our 2nd Annual Pumpkin Carving contest, where our team’s creativity and focus are on full display as they compete for fun prizes. Just as each pumpkin is carefully carved and designed, each mailing project we handle is managed with meticulous care to ensure it reaches its intended destination smoothly. Ok, but more on this later. Let’s get back to missing addresses, shall we?

The Phantom of the Missing Address: How It Haunts Your Business

The phantom of the missing address lurks in outdated mailing lists, incorrect addresses, and overlooked details. When mailing lists aren’t current, your communications risk being returned like haunted echoes, resulting in wasted postage, delayed timelines, and costly reprints. The nightmare of managing undelivered or misdelivered mail due to wrong addresses in your address list can drain valuable time and resources from your business—especially as year-end deadlines loom. This is why mailing address validation is important.

Avoid the Nightmare of Returned Mail with LetterStream’s Address Cleanup Solutions

LetterStream finds data accuracy extremely important, which is why our Address Cleanup services cover every essential step to keep your mailing lists fresh, accurate, and compliant with USPS standards. By standardizing and validating each address through address verification and cleanup services, we eliminate the risk of costly returns and ensure that your communications arrive as intended.

Here’s how our Address Cleanup services work:

Address Standardization: Every address is formatted to United States Postal Service standards, including standard abbreviations, uppercase text, and compressed data for postal automation compliance.
Spelling and Formatting Corrections: Our system corrects common spelling errors in street and city names and applies standard formatting, reducing the chance of undelivered mail due to minor errors.
Zip+4 Code Addition: We automatically add the Zip+4 extension to each address, enhancing delivery accuracy and reducing processing times.
Duplicate Record Removal: We identify and remove duplicate entries to prevent unnecessary mailings and reduce postage costs.
Delivery Point Validation (DPV): DPV verifies that the house or street number exists within the known range for each street, further ensuring accurate delivery and avoiding undeliverable mail.

With these Address Cleanup features, we make sure your mailing lists are accurate and compliant, so your mailings are delivered on time, every time.

Enhancing Accuracy with National Change of Address (NCOA) Services

For even greater accuracy, LetterStream’s National Change of Address (NCOA) services (another address verification tool) goes beyond standard address cleanup. By referencing the USPS change-of-address system, we can identify recipients who have moved within the past 18 months and provide their most current address. This process improves deliverability and reduces the risk of returned mail due to recent moves.

Here’s what our NCOA services include:

Address Cleanup Services: Everything in the list above for Address Cleanup Services
Move Verification: Using the USPS address change data service, we check if anyone on your mailing list has relocated, so you don’t lose touch with customers or clients due to outdated addresses.
Address Updates: Once we identify recipients who have moved, we update their mailing information to reflect their current address, ensuring every piece of mail reaches its intended recipient.
Enhanced Deliverability: Our NCOA service increases the reach of your communications by keeping your lists accurate and current, helping you avoid the cost and hassle of returned mail.

With NCOA, LetterStream goes the extra mile to keep your mailing lists updated and deliverability high, protecting your business from the disruptions that come with outdated addresses.

Carving Out Community and Quality: Our Pumpkin Contest and Commitment to Excellence

LetterStream's employees who help with address cleanup, celebrate with a Halloween party

Ok, now that the important information has been gone over, let’s talk a little bit more about our office fun. Our pumpkin carving contest is a highlight of Halloween at LetterStream. Employees unleash their creativity, crafting intricate designs while enjoying some well-deserved Halloween treats, food and friendly competition. This celebration of teamwork, creativity, and precision is woven into our work culture in ways that directly benefit our clients.

How you might ask? Good question.

Just as each pumpkin is carved with unique care and creativity, our dedication to meticulousness is apparent in the work we send out. Our employees pay close attention to details, verifying addresses, ensuring letters reach the correct recipients, and double-checking data to prevent errors. From address cleanup to NCOA processing, each step is performed with precision, so every piece of mail reaches its intended recipient without a hitch.

Our team’s commitment to accuracy helps protect your business from the costly mistakes of undelivered or misdelivered mail, letting you rest easy—even during the spookiest season.

Don’t Let Missing Addresses Haunt Your Mailings

To bring it full circle, this Halloween, let’s make sure the phantom of the missing address doesn’t haunt your business. When partnering with LetterStream, you’re gaining a team dedicated to precision and reliability. With our Address Cleanup and NCOA mailing services, you’ll save time, money, and peace of mind. Plus, you’ll know you’re working with a company that values creativity and community—both within our walls and in our partnerships with clients.

Contact us today to learn how we can help you stay one step ahead of those haunting mailing errors and keep your business running smoothly through the spooky season and beyond. And from all of us at LetterStream, Happy Halloween!

LetterStream is an online printing and mailing company, offering bulk printing and mailing business mailing solutions for businesses of all sizes, from those with small business mailing needs to Fortune 500 companies that want to send mail online. Click here to create a free account.

Why Do I Get So Much Returned Mail?

Stack of USPS return mail

Gosh, we wonder the same thing. Will it ever stop?

But fortunately for us, we get paid to process returned mail, so maybe it’s not such a bad thing after all (at least, not in our case). 😉

Mail gets returned to the sender for a lot of different reasons, and sometimes, for no reason at all. Almost all returned mail has a yellow sticker on it that has been placed there by the Post Office.

In this blog post we’ve put together a little Troubleshooting Guide to Returned Mail that should help you “sort it out”–sorry, couldn’t resist.

Let’s start with the obvious reasons and work our way down.

1. The address on your letter is incorrect. This could be anything from the wrong zip code, to a misspelled city name, to a street address that doesn’t exist. The yellow sticker may say “No Such Address” or “No Unit” or “No Such City”. To correct this, a) Double check your records and make sure you’ve got the right address and/or b) go to USPS.com, click on the link on the left to “Find a Zip Code” and enter your address. If the USPS website can’t find the address, chances are it isn’t correct. You can also use our online address correction tools to clean up an entire mailing list.

2. The person no longer lives at that address. It could be that your address is fine but the mail piece was returned because the person has moved. The yellow sticker might say “Unable to forward” or “Forwarding Address Expired” or “Not at this address” or “No such person”. With north of 7% of Americans moving each year, you can anticipate that your mailing list will have similar changes. When someone moves, they fill out a change of address card (online or at their local post office) which the Postal Service puts in their computer systems to verify addresses. So, when a letter is addressed to a good address, to a specific person who filled out a change of address card, their mail will be forwarded to their new address. Unfortunately, if the person didn’t fill out a change of address card, but they did move, that mail piece will be returned to you. This is the same as “moved – left no forwarding address”. We have an online tool that lets you see if people have moved (filling out the changed of address card) any time in the last 18 months and provides you with their new address.

3. The person has no mailbox. This isn’t very common, but it can happen. The yellow sticker might say “No receptacle”. This means there is no mailbox for the mail carrier to put the mail in. This could occur because the house is new, isn’t built at that address yet, or the mailbox was blown over in a storm or run over by a car. There could be many other things that take out a mailbox, or it could have been taken down intentionally by the owner. Unfortunately we don’t have any online tools to solve this one.

4. The Post Office didn’t get it right. Sometimes the postal clerk or someone else at the post office gets confused and assumes or incorrectly determines that the mail can’t be delivered. There’s not much we can do to help out on this one, but if you believe everything is correct with the name and address then drop it back in the mail and see what happens. It just might make it where it needs to go the second time around!

Reduce Returned Mail with Address Correction by LetterStream

USPS Return Mail

Some LetterStream customers are already realizing the annual savings created by weeding out and/or correcting undeliverable addresses.

If you acquire new mailing lists (member lists, community lists, etc.), especially from non-qualified list providers, it might be worth a little investment to make sure the addresses that you’ve been provided are valid ones.

Using address correction tools to clean up addresses and discover which ones are incorrect could pay for itself with the first mailing. If the list is used over and over, the savings keep accumulating.

Consider a mailing list of 1,200 names. If 5% of the addresses are undeliverable, you would be wasting more than $25 in postage fees alone, not counting time, paper, printing, envelopes, etc. If you mail to the same list each month, that would add up to hundreds of dollars in no time. Another cost to consider is the time and money wasted handling the return mail; collecting bins of returned mail itself, looking up new addresses, resending documents by hand, shred fees for properly destroying returned mail and environmental impacts.

So, here’s an idea… if you acquire a mailing list or simply get a lot of return mail, try running your mailing list through our address correction tools. You can upload any size mailing list directly to our website for cleaning and we will return the results fast; often in less than 10 minutes. We’ll format the addresses to USPS CASS (Coding Accuracy Support System) standards, correct City and Street spellings, flag undeliverable addresses, and attempt to assign the correct zip code with zip+4 digits.

If you use our Deluxe Address Cleanup, which includes NCOA (National Change of Address) lookups, we can even tell you if the person filed a change of address card with the Post Office, letting you know exactly when they moved and where they moved to.

Reducing returned mail is good for business, good for the pocketbook, and good for your sanity!

How Can I Look Up a Zip Code?

Map with push pin

If you are trying to find the correct zip code for an address, the United States Postal Service (USPS) website has a quick and easy tool that you can use for free.

However, if you are trying to find the correct postal zip code for multiple addresses in a list, you might want to review our address correction tools. In addition to assigning zip codes to multiple records at a time, our address correction software will fix misspelled city names and improper state abbreviations, as well as standardize the street directions and road names.

If you really want to clean up a mailing list, you might consider using our advanced address list correction tool, which will provide the address someone has moved to (provided they have filled out a change of address card online or at the post office).

Visit LetterStream.com to send first-class and Certified Mail utilizing our advanced address correction tools.