Screening against gone away files enables companies to comply with data protection legislation, satisfy the requirements of industry codes of practice and ensure that budget is not wasted.

Every item of mail sent to a gone away costs money and undermines the favourable perception of your brand. But how can you ensure that the gone aways you identify have really moved?

Some suppression files incorporate assumed gone away information, including postal returns from consortiums of high volume mailers. Acxiom, suppliers of the Purity file, have drawn on their vast data resources and over 15 years' experience of collecting and handling consumer information, to create a file of validated non-resident records for use as a suppression tool. Approximately 40 per cent of the gone away records Acxiom have collected are unique to the Purity file and the company guarantees that every move-out has been validated with a subsequent move-in before the record has been included in the file.

With more than eleven per cent of the UK population moving house each year, creating in excess of 5 million address changes, customer and prospect databases degrade alarmingly quickly. Receiving monthly updates and containing over 13.5 million records, data for the Purity file is collected through a range of sources, including Electoral Roll updates, ongoing lifestyle surveys, subscriptions and warranty card responses.