File: article.txt
To: Editors and Columnists			From: Scott Olmsted, Nuts & Bolts Software
[Permission is given to use the following article as is, or as source material for other articles, provided that the information in the last paragraph is retained]

Update Your Mailing List Using The NCOA On Disk
by Scott M. Olmsted, Nuts & Bolts Software

Are you a small business with a mailing list maintained on a desktop PC? If so, you know it takes work to maintain your list: purging bad addresses, entering forwarding addresses, and so forth. Up to 20% of the U.S. population moves every year, and a mailing list can go "stale" very quickly, increasing the cost of reaching each prospect.

How much would it be worth to you to receive address correction and ZIP+4 for your list without the time and cost of manual data entry? Almost any reasonable numbers for printing, postage, and data entry costs will yield a value of several cents per name in your list. And yet, though it is little known among small business owners, there is such a service available for $7.00 per 1000 names. That's less than one cent per name!

The information is supplied by the National Change Of Address Center (NCOA), a part of the US Postal Service. The services are actually provided by a dozen or so vendors under license to the NCOA. While most NCOA users are large mailers that supply their lists on magnetic tape, one vendor provides the service on floppy disks.

To use the service, you send your mailing list on disk in a fixed-field format. The NCOA vendor returns your disks accompanied by additional disks. On these they write your original fields, plus an additional 470 characters in 24 fields. Included is a standardized version with ZIP+4 of the address you supplied, a forwarding address if one is on file, and several flags with information about these addresses. It is left to you to combine all this information into a form you can use.

This is more complex and time-consuming than most small businesses can handle. That is why Nuts & Bolts Software has created a shareware product to do it all for you. With EZ-NCOA, you merely export your mailing list in comma-delimited ASCII format. From this file EZ-NCOA creates the disks you send to the NCOA. EZ-NCOA then reads the disks returned by the NCOA, and creates a new comma-delimited ASCII file for you to import into your mailing list.

You need do no programming, nor figure out any complex file formats. EZ-NCOA preserves all the non-address fields in your list and makes using the NCOA a breeze. In addition, EZ-NCOA can make the results more attractive. The NCOA supplies all addresses in upper case only because the Postal Service prefers this. Upper case is easier for their automated mail sorters to read. The registered version of EZ-NCOA can convert addresses to upper and lower case if that is what you prefer.

What kind of results can you expect? While the NCOA does not have a forwarding address for every move, our experience is that you can obtain 70% to 90% of those that have been filed by the addressee. The older your list, the more valuable the NCOA service becomes; however, even a list that has not been corrected for only six months can be cost-effective to process. In addition, every invalid address can be removed from your list and ZIP+4 added to all addresses. For mailers adding barcodes, the NCOA is now supplying the extra two "Delivery Digits" needed to qualify for barcoding discounts after March 21, 1993.

A registered copy of EZ-NCOA is available from Nuts & Bolts Software, 1324 Calle Scott, Encinitas CA 92024, (619) 942-9692, for $55.00 plus $4.00 shipping and handling ($5.00 Canada and $8.00 outside North America).