The Scenario
The postcard campaign brief landed in your inbox on a Tuesday. Three hundred thousand pieces, five regional drops, launch in two weeks. You're the direct mail manager — you've run this before — and the first thing you need is confidence that the list is clean.
Your workbook has 500 rows: column A is the customer name, column B is the mailing address. Some of these came from a form submission six months ago. Some were pulled from a CRM export. A chunk of them have never been touched by a verification system.
The bad version:
- Copy batches of addresses into Lob's dashboard verification UI, one at a time, since bulk upload requires API access you don't have set up
- Manually record each result in a separate worksheet, trying to keep rows aligned with the original
- Spend two hours cross-referencing which row corresponds to which verification result, then discover three rows slipped out of order when you re-sorted the original
Your print vendor charges for undeliverable pieces. A bad list doesn't just waste budget — it surfaces as a deliverability report that goes straight to the VP who approved the campaign spend. There's no graceful way to explain that two hundred pieces went to addresses that don't match the names on file.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads your data, connects to Lob's identity verification API, and writes the results back into your workbook — column by column, row by row. No separate tool, no batch upload, no manual alignment.
For each row with a name in column A and address in column B, call Lob's identity validation and write 'Valid' or 'Invalid' in column C, then count totals in cells E1 and E2.
What You Get
- Column C filled with 'Valid' or 'Invalid' for every row in the range
- Cell E1 showing the total count of valid name–address pairs
- Cell E2 showing the count of failed validations
- Any rows where Lob returns an error flagged with the error message in column C instead of a binary result
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The addresses have inconsistent formatting — some have unit numbers, some don't, some have "St" vs "Street"
Before validating, normalize the addresses in column B so that street type abbreviations are consistent and unit numbers are formatted as "Apt 4B" rather than "#4B", then validate each name–address pair in columns A and B using Lob and write the result to column C.
Some rows in column A have the full company name instead of a person's name
For rows where column A contains a company name (no first/last name pattern), skip identity validation and write 'Company — skip' in column C. For all other rows, validate the name against the address in column B using Lob and write 'Valid' or 'Invalid' to column C.
The list came from two source worksheets and the formatting differs between them
Combine the name and address data from the 'Q1 Leads' worksheet and the 'Reactivation List' worksheet into a unified range on this sheet, deduplicate rows where the address in column B matches exactly, then validate each name–address pair using Lob and write the result in column C.
Some rows have already been verified — I only want to re-check the ones marked 'Unverified'
For all rows where column C contains 'Unverified', validate the name in column A against the address in column B using Lob, overwrite column C with the result, and update the summary counts in E1 and E2 to reflect the full column including previously verified rows.
The pattern: ask for data cleanup and the verification action together — SheetXAI handles both in a single pass.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your mailing list workbook, then ask it to validate every row against Lob identity verification before your next campaign drop. Then check out the spoke on bulk-creating Lob short links or the full Lob integration overview.