How Does NCOALink Work with Multiple Address Changes?

The NCOALink contains around 160 million permanent change of address, or COA, records. The records contain the names and addresses of businesses, families, and individuals who’ve filed a COA request with the USPS. This database is provided to companies that are officially licensed by the United States Postal Service and is frequently updated.

How NCOALink Processes Address Changes

When a business, family, or individual requests a change of address, the USPS adds the newest verifiable address information to the profile of the requestee immediately. NCOALink matches this new address data against any preexisting entries, including old addresses. When a match is found and the system detects that it’s a ‘move’, the system will use the new address. This helps to keep the NCOALink database as up-to-date as possible. COA data includes any moves made within the past 18 or 48 months, including when a single individual, family, or business makes more than one address change request in a 12-month period.

Multiple Address Changes Within a Year

When businesses or individuals move and perform a change of address request, the USPS updates those address parameters as stated above. Fortunately, this process is the same for those who perform multiple changes of address requests in a year. This counts for any change of address request reason, such as an incorrect or missing apartment number or incorrectly listing an ‘avenue’ as a ‘boulevard’.

Each time an additional change is needed to an address, the customer needing the change notifies the USPS and, through the power of NCOALink, ensures that the most recent information is updated once an NCOALink match is found.

NCOALink Benefits

By having this ever-evolving database of COA requests, undeliverable mail is dramatically reduced due to having the newest information available for licensees to pull from. This includes both standardized and delivery point-coded addresses for matching within NCOALink. It also helps to prevent and, in some cases, completely eliminate re-mailings since COA requests are applied to user profiles prior to any new mail being sent out.

Additionally, this helps to reduce the overall financial costs associated with undeliverable mail pieces — fewer labor hours, fewer raw materials, and an increase in revenue and profit. And not only can the NCOALink help increase the security of customer data, but it also lends a hand in providing faster and more efficient product and service marketing.

Additional Databases

SmartSoft also utilizes ANKLink, which stands for Address Not Known. This enhancement provides an additional 30 months of change of address information. While ANKLink won’t provide new address data, it will flag all any move data found from months 19-48 including move date, match type, and verified return code.

When combined with the power of NCOALink, companies are armed with a multitude of powerful address verification tools backed by first-party data from the USPS. While this is certainly beneficial for retail businesses like online e-commerce shops, this also helps verify address viability for government entities, school systems, marketing companies, and more.

Make Addresses Accurate Again

In 2022, with all of the other advancements in technology, shouldn’t your mailing department get the upgrade it deserves? Save your company both time and money by eliminating misspelled, incorrect, and undeliverable addresses. Available databases cover both the United States of America and Canada, so whether you’re using USPS or Canada Post, you’ll know that your mail has the highest probability of landing in the right hands.

Still not convinced? We get it. You can check out our free single-address lookup tool to test any address yourself.