Structure of a Mailing List

In my job I deal with mailer created lists and databases on a daily basis. Some are better that others, but almost all could be structured better. Since data is one of the cornerstones of Relevancy Marketing, I thought I'd take a minute to discuss how it should be structured. I am only addressing the mailing list portion of the data here. Any additional data can be structured as required.

An address consists of several elements:

• Addressee or Contact
• Firm (Company or Organization)
• Address
• Suite, Floor or Apartment
• City
• State
• Zip or Postal Code
• Country

There is only one address line. So your data should contain only one address line. You may in fact have two or three on your data, but only one is the mailing address. The problem is that in your data, it may be spread across three fields. This type of data structure greatly increases the chances that the address will be washed out of the list during the zip+4 encoding, or become UAA (undeliverable as addresses) during mailing. Let's look at what an address might look like:

Chuck Lafean
PO Box 665
123 Court St.
Floor 2
Auburn, MA 09210

What I have here is actually two addresses, a mailing address and a physical address. If this is run through CASS sofftware (coding accuracy support system, this is a USPS term, describing confirming an address is deliverable and appending a delivery point barcode), both addresses are probably good. Great, right? No, the physical address 123 Court St. may not have a mail receptacle, and if it does, floor 2 may not. The correct mailing address in this case is:

Chuck Lafean
PO Box 665
Auburn, MA 09210

Here is a basic template for a simple mailings list: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pG1NFxLqU5zi5m9gi7U-xZw. Simply copy and paste the header into a blank spreadsheet.