The USPS maintains a database with approximately 160 million Latest Mailing Database records or 48 months of permanent address changes. It's called the Latest Mailing Database NCOALink product. You can submit your mailing list or database records to USPS approved vendors for NCOALink processing to match your addresses to the change-of-address records on file with the USPS.
Since 1986 when the USPS introduced the product, NCOALink has Latest Mailing Database saved mailers billions of dollars that otherwise would have been Latest Mailing Database wasted in paper, postage, and labor costs. NCOALink processing your mailing list before mailing can have a significant impact on the ROI for a direct mail campaign. Let's take an example of a 100,000 piece mailing at bulk rate with a total cost of $0.50 per piece.
For this example let's say that the mailing will Latest Mailing Database generate a 1.5 percent response rate and $50 in average sales. Let's assume that the Latest Mailing Database list hasn't been NCOALink processed in the last 12 months and there is a "bad" address rate of 5percent.