Mailing File
Our mailing file service produces an additional file in a fixed format to make it easier to produce your mailings.
When you purchase any of our data cleansing services, you will receive an output file of the same format as the file you provided. Any services that provide additional data will create extra columns at the end of your file, e.g. adding goneaway flags or a cleansed version of the address.
Regardless of the type of file or number of columns you provide to us, and whether you purchase services such as Goneaway and Deceased as flags rather than suppressions, the Mailing File output will always:
- be a CSV format file
- contain a header line
- remove any records that are matched by services such as MPS, Goneaway, Deceased or Deduplicate, even if you purchased these services with the flagging option
File Layout
The column layout of the mailing file is always:
- ID
- Title
- First Name
- Last Name
- Address Line 1
- Address Line 2
- Address Line 3
- Address Line 4
- Town
- Postcode
- DPS
- Country
Identifier
If you included an Identifier column in your file, this value will be used for column 1. Otherwise this will be the number of the record within your source file.
Name
If you purchased the results of the Name Cleansing service, the cleansed name is used for columns 2 – 4. Otherwise, the name (if any) supplied in your source file will be used. The columns for any parts of the name that you did not include any data for will be left blank, e.g. if your source file had columns for first name and last name but not title. If your source file had a single column for the name rather than the different parts being split out, you must purchase the Name Cleansing service in order to purchase the Mailing File.
Address
The address in the Mailing File will take into account any new addresses you may have purchased through the Movers service. The address will always be formatted to fit over 4 lines plus the town and postcode in separate fields. Note that the county is not included as the use of the county for mailings is discouraged by Royal Mail. The DPS is also included in a separate field to help you apply mailsort or similar bulk mailing programmes.
Country
The country field will be taken from the results of the Country Detection service if you have purchased it. Otherwise it will use the value in the column in your source file that was mapped as the country field. If the source file didn’t contain a country column, this field will be left blank.
