With the holiday season just behind us - and all the cards, catalogs and promotional mailings that go along with it - Melissa Data, a provider of data quality and address management solutions, reminds us that it is more important than ever to correct and cleanse data for customers and constituents in the new year. It's a green approach on many levels.

Bad addresses result in much more than wasted effort and missed opportunities. According to Greg Brown, marketing director at Melissa, more than 6 million trees and more than 300 million pounds of paper are wasted each year on undeliverable-as-addressed Standard class mail. If that isn't bad enough, it costs the postal service more than $2 billion annually to process this "junk" mail, and the undeliverable mail also costs direct mailers more than $6 billion annually. For more information about Melissa Data's solutions, go here.

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