Listsource data incomplete?

Question

Hi.  I am doing a bunch of yellow letters and I got a list from listsource.  I was going through the data, and I found that "owner 1 label name" "owner 1 first name/last name"  Some of these fields were empty, or it looked like, they were backwards.  Sometimes it had the name of a trust, or just a last name, etc.

Anyway, how do you make it look like a "personalized" yellow letter if its printing up name backwards or wrong names, etc?  Is there a way to filter out these people on listsource (or any method to get this fixed)?  And I never would've noticed, had I sent it to a company to write and mail them (which I will do next time).

Is there a way to fix it?  I had a lot of Chinese names, and wasn't sure if they were in the order of first, then last name.  I saw that there were a few average names that were obviously backwards.

Bill S. · Answer

@Eric Narciso this is my take on it. The data is not perfect. That's just the way life is. You have to know that going in and it has to be part of the equation. It is time/cost prohibitive for me to scrub my lists. First of all, I search the list for trusts and delete those records. I then search for blanks and fill in if I can find them. Anything beyond that either gets trashed by the recipient or comes back nixie. I have modified my letters and envelopes so that these types of errors are less obvious.

When leads cost 10 cents and my time is worth $100/hr that means I have less than 1 second to correct the lead or it's not worth my time.

Unless your list is highly targeted and cross referenced against other lists, there is little value in trying to correct these situations.

That's just my opinion and perhaps others will have another take on it.

Eric Narciso · Answer

Yea I was looking through the list, but wasn't sure where to get the real info.  THanks, Ill check those records, and yes, they are absentee owners, so county records will be a pain going from state to state and site to site.

I was just hoping there was an easier way than going through thousands names

Sean McNamara · Answer

@Eric NarcisoI have experienced this issue as well. Quick question, is it an absentee owner or owner occupied list? As far as I can tell this is an unfortunate mistake made by whatever software they are using to scrape the data. I am hoping that someone can chime in with a faster, simpler way to fix the list (as I have spent too much time fixing entries by hand), but until then I suggest you just compare it to public records and fix the obvious mistakes. I am not sure if you have this same issue but in Colorado some of the lists we purchase will have the owner name as "Not Avail from County" and you will have to look up the home address of that absentee owner in whatever public records search you use and verify the order and spelling of the name.

Hope this helps! Anyone out there please let me know if you have a faster way.