A warm welcome back to Jerry Wick of Custom Data Too Mail, Inc…

The title on my business card is President and Envelope Pushologist! We push letters and statements into envelopes, and I like to “push the envelope” too.

Recently, my wife and I received three duplicate letters at home and two duplicates at our nearby office asking for a donation. I called the fundraiser and told them about the additional letters. The receptionist said, “you’re not the first to call about the duplicates.” I found the right person to talk to, and asked to run the file for them and compare record counts. The input file had 34,249 records, and when we were done there were only 32,113 records. That’s a lot of print, envelopes, inserting, postage and most importantly embarrassment.           

When files are prepped for mailing, CASS and NCOA is the easy part; it’s the merge/purge that can get a little tricky. Make sure your rules are set up clearly. For instance, how would you handle John Doe vs. John and Mary Doe vs. John P Doe vs. Dr. John Doe that all live at the same address? 123 South Oak Street vs. 123 S. Oak St.— what’s the difference? These are good questions to answer before the files are prepared. Many printers that handle mail prep have a stripped down software version to handle merge/purge. I’d rather pull the duplicates, save them money and handle another mailing!