Data quality software and services provider Melissa Data has acquired Peoplesmith Software, a company that has produced direct mailing services since 1980.
Rancho Santa Margarita-based Melissa Data‘s address correction and postal automation software will now be sold with Scituate, MA-based Peoplesmith‘s software and API tools that merge and purge, sort and correctly format databases. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Melissa Data said direct marketers want integrated software solutions that enable them to verify, correct and standardize contact data to help better target and streamline their marketing and mailing operations.
Melissa Data said the combination of tools is needed as the cost of mail is increasing.
For more than 15 years, Melissa Data has been a reseller of several Peoplesmith products that complemented their own tools. Now the following products are being sold directly from Melissa Data, with technical support offered by staff that came over from Peoplesmith.
–StyleList, a field-formatting tool that customizes fields to enhance appearance and provide correct punctuation and proper spelling of names and addresses. StyleList 5 will also control upper and lower cases for companies that have all caps. SyleList 5 is a suite of integrated utilities that makes merging, sorting and de-duplicating easier for volume mailers.
–Personator, a tool that helps parse and genderize the names in a database. This tool increases response rates by adding a personal touch to form communications and can add salutations using a database of the 8,500 most common first names in the United States and Canada.
–DoubleTake III, a tool that merges and purges files at the same time, allows marketers to reduce costs associated with duplicate records and increase response rates.
–RightFielder 3, a tool that gives users the control and flexibility to transform jumbled text data into correctly fielded information that can be used with any database program. When field data is not formatted uniformly, it cannot be purged of duplicates, presorted or ZIP + 4 coded – all of the processes that save on postage and printing fees.
