Melissa Data Announces Internet Search Tools for Holiday Mailers

Free resources can help lower postage costs and improve deliverability

RANCHO SANTA MARGARITA, Calif. (Dec. 1, 2003) – With the holiday mailing season in full swing, Melissa Data today announced Internet search tools to help mailers verify the accuracy of addresses and speed delivery of their greeting cards, letters and packages.

Melissa Data’s Free LookUps search tools can be used to find missing ZIP codes, complete partial street addresses, or correct misspelled city names. A search will also return a ZIP+4 code to an address. This 9-digit ZIP can speed delivery of mail by up to two days, a critical advantage during the busy Thanksgiving-to-Christmas season when the U.S. Postal Service will handle 20 billion pieces of mail.

“Verified, corrected addresses will improve the deliverability of mail and parcels and ensure that your paper, postage and resources are not wasted,” commented Raymond Melissa, president and founder of Melissa Data.

Melissa Data’s most popular Free LookUps are Zip-City-Phone, U.S. Addresses and Phone Numbers. These three databases, available at www.melissadata.com/lookups, average more than 340,000 page views a day, demonstrating that value-added search tools are one of the most popular uses of the Internet.

The search tools work by allowing input of variations of street names, area codes, partial or whole telephone numbers, or ZIP codes. The data returned by Melissa Data enables users not only to verify mailing addresses, but also to update phone numbers and access the latest demographic data on states, cities and counties.
 
The search service consists of 23 specialized databases. Users can find home values, look up climate averages, and learn about U.S. place names. One unique search is the phone number lookup. With this feature, a user can easily trace the origin of a phone call from a caller ID service.

Melissa Data has spent hundreds of hours of programming time to build an efficient suite of tools and services to make this data easily accessible from a single location. Moreover, Melissa Data is certified annually by the U.S. Postal Service to use and distribute address data, a guarantee of accuracy and reliability. 

Additional Uses of the Free LookUps Engine
Melissa Data’s search databases can also be used to: 1) find Canadian address and phone data, 2) display area codes or ZIP codes within a radius, 3) calculate the distance between any two ZIP codes, 4) locate post offices, 5) get location information on worldwide place names, 6) find the time zone of a phone number, 7) find out average home values, 7) access U.S. tax statistics, and 8) order mailing lists.

About Melissa Data
Celebrating its 20th year in business, Melissa Data, the Data Superstore, helps companies manage and optimize their contact data. Melissa Data provides solutions for address and phone number validation, postal coding, data enhancements and sales leads. Every day more than 70,000 people visit the company’s Web site. A powerful line of software, databases, programming tools, and hygiene services has made Melissa Data a recognized leader in the data quality industry. For more information, or to request trial software, contact Melissa Data at 1-800-800-6245 or visit www.melissadata.com