Undeliverable transactional mail increases your delivery costs and can create compliance concerns. It can also impact customer remittance and loyalty. If recipients don’t receive statements, invoices, or letters in a timely manner, then they won’t respond in one either. Address hygiene tools can counter this.

Critical to ensuring deliverability is having the right address, which is trickier than it seems. PCI Group has developed proprietary technology to “scrub” your addresses for greater accuracy.

How Much Is Bad Address Data Costing You?

Do you currently have a high volume of returned mail? It’s inconvenient, costly, and could trigger compliance concerns. The expense of printing, processing, and mailing adds up, creating higher expenditures for print and mail.

By applying an address hygiene tool, you can shrink that number significantly. 

What Is Address Hygiene?

Address hygiene describes processes by transactional print and mail companies to verify addresses. There are several components:

• Standardizing the format of addresses to align with postal regulations
• Validating the address exists and can receive mail
• Cleansing data to correct errors
• Removing duplicate addresses
• Comparing current addresses to electronic address changes submitted to USPS and updating

How PCI Scrub Works

PCI Scrub is an innovative tool designed to improve mail deliverability while minimizing the high costs associated with undelivered mail.

PCI Scrub helps locate people who move to a new address. Before the printing of any jobs, the program identifies and intercepts inaccurate or incomplete addresses. It’s a standard offering for all transactional print and mail customers.

We’ve integrated this proprietary technology into our postal presorting process, in conjunction with our deployment of the USPS Intelligent Mail Barcode (IMb). The application of this automation scrubs mailing addresses provided, bolstering accuracy and delivery rates.

If the tool finds an updated address, the new address replaces the old one immediately. You also receive notifications of this updated information electronically so you can revise it within your database.

If the system cannot verify or find the address, PCI Scrub rejects it before printing anything. You then receive a file of these errors. It’s available within hours of receiving your data files.

Benefits of Address Hygiene

Why use an address hygiene tool? There are many advantages, including:

• Reducing postage costs: Since the system rejects undeliverable addresses, you won’t incur postage fees to mail them.
• Compliance support: Transactional print and mail must follow regulatory guidelines about the timeliness of communications you send. Correct addresses translate to greater deliverability.
• Greater accuracy: Since you receive address updates, your internal databases will be more precise for any type of communication you send.

The Technology Behind Address Hygiene

We process millions of electronic address change records every month. That’s more than any other document delivery provider. The cost and time savings of our electronic address scrub and change capabilities for our clients are considerable.

Here are the technical aspects behind the tool

• NCOALink: Maintained by the USPS, NCOA (National Change of Address) represents all permanent change-of-address records filed over the past 48 months. The system updates weekly. We use the NCOA processing on your mailings to reduce undeliverable mail.
• Address Element Correction (AEC): The USPS developed this to increase the percentage of properly addressed mail. The computerized address correction mechanism uses computer logic to correct common misspellings and other usage errors.
• Pixie: We built this database to support address scrubbing. It includes known bad addresses from a large client pool. Pixie provides additional savings by eliminating bad addresses prior to mailing. Clients have the option of opting at no additional cost.

Learn More About PCI Scrub

Complete the form to request a no-cost consultation. We’ll review PCI Scrub and how it fits into our turnkey transactional print and mail workflow.