For any of you marketers out there who use direct mail marketing as a part of your marketing strategy, you know how “dirty” your mailing lists can get after time. Bad or invalid mailing addresses can have a negative impact on your direct mail campaign performance and can alter your return on investment. Why not just remove those bad addresses? Based on the size of your mailing list, it takes a tremendous amount of time and patience to identify the problem addresses and then try to fix them by either removing them completely from your database or by contacting the customer / client and requesting updated information.

For most small to medium size businesses, mailing list cleansing tools may seem overpriced and out of reach due to smaller mailing lists. That is until now! The wonderful folks over at Pitney Bowes have released what they call “AddressRightNow“, a service where the user can upload their mailing list to Pitney’s website, and within minutes you can identify invalid addresses from your list and either download those entries or have them removed from your list. The other service offered will alert you if any of the people in your list have moved to another location and will even provide you with that new and updated address.

The new Pitney Bowes AddressRightNow service will also help you get your addresses compliant with the USPS standards for updating mailing lists. Starting on January 10th, 2010, if you do not adhere to these standards you may be subject to an addtional 7 cents per mailer that does not meet these requirements.

Now the good part. How much does this service cost? Well, it is relatively affordable considering the 3 levels of service you are getting and the savings you will see from cutting out the bad addresses from your lists. Address verification services start at $40 for up to 1,000 addresses, and the move update services begin at $60 for up to 1,000 addresses. While there are no requirements for how big or small your list has to be, there do appear to be certain price breaks if you have a larger list or if you send mailers more frequently. For more information on the pricing, check out the three plans available on the Pitney Bowes website. Those plans are the “One Time Payment” plan, the “Basic Subscription” plan, and the “Enhanced Subscription” plan.

While these mail list cleansing services may seem unnecessary for some direct mail programs, the potential cost savings and delivery rate increases seem like enough reason to give one a shot and see what kind of effect it has on your campaign.