A rep drives out, walks up, and it is a hay barn. A postcard goes out and comes back marked undeliverable. Both cost you every time, and both come off the same list.
The list is rarely wrong everywhere. It is wrong worst out in the rural stretches, where a wasted call costs a morning instead of ten minutes.
Send us a sample of the addresses your team is working. We will check them at no cost and tell you which ones are not really there.
A rep routes to a coordinate, not to a line of text. In one market, one address in five sat more than fifty feet from where the engineer had put it. Thirty were out by more than five hundred feet. The worst was wrong by six and a half miles.
Postal validation will not catch that. It confirms the address can receive mail. It says nothing about which building the pin is sitting on, or whether a rep sent there will find a house.
Of the addresses one operator had run through postal validation, nearly four in ten came back not deliverable, and stayed on the list anyway. Every one of those is a direct mail piece printed, posted and returned.
You get the list back as a CSV with a reason on every record, so an address that is real but not mailable can be worked door to door and left out of the direct mail run, instead of failing quietly in both. Deliverability stops being something you find out about a fortnight later.
On a clean town block about one in ten of the records needed a change. Out along the rural roads more than half of them did. The data is worst exactly where canvassing costs most — where a wasted trip is longest and a knock is least safe.
Most of it settles at the desk, against parcel maps and imagery. The handful that cannot be settled that way is priced separately, clustered by route so one drive answers several questions.