Address verification: How to pick the best address verification services

How important is data in your business? Data will likely be the backbone behind your operational and marketing decisions, empowering you with the knowledge you need to run your business and reach customers in the most efficient and effective ways. Essentially, the quality of your customer data has a direct impact on your company’s ability to garner success. And in today’s digitally-driven society, addresses have become one of the key data elements your business can’t afford to neglect.

Think about how imperative address data is in your everyday operations. Whether you need to ship a package to a client or want to send out marketing materials to a prospective customer via mail, address verification software will provide you with the high-quality data you need to successfully reach your audience. To maximize your ROI and reap the most success from your address verification software, you want to partner up with a business that offers the best data verification tools for your company. Below, we’ll delve into what you need to know to ensure you select the best option available on the market.

What is address verification (and why does it matter)?

When you place an order online, it’s easy to overlook the number of touchpoints your package must go through to travel from its original destination to your front door. For businesses, it’s crucial to minimize the room for error that inevitably happens when customers, or customer representatives, add an address into your company’s database. Enter address verification into the equation.

Address verification software allows businesses to check mailing addresses against an authoritative database to determine their validity, which in turn maximizes your chances of having the correct customer addresses in your CRM. If you think you can handle customer data management without the help of address validation software, consider the following:

• Nearly 36 million address changes occurred in 2020¹, meaning millions of addresses become invalid every year
• Shoppers have a higher chance of mistyping their address without a real-time address verification system in place
• Call center representatives may mishear or mistype a user’s address into your database, entering the wrong address information into a customer’s profile

Investing in address validation software can provide you the peace of mind in knowing that you are improving the accuracy of your existing address data while providing a more seamless experience for customers at check-out, too.

Picking the best address verification provider

While you may understand that address validation is key to your business’s daily operations, it’s important to note that data quality solutions vary depending on the provider. At a quick glance, the right address verification service will be able to:

• Verify whether the address exists or is invalid
• Identify if the address is properly formatted
• Standardize address formats when necessary
• Offer real-time or batch solutions

On the surface, these are the basic capabilities any address validation software should be able to offer to a business. But, with the myriad of data solutions available on the market, it’s important to experience the highest return on investment for your business by aligning with a company that best suits your needs. Here are a few other points to consider when picking the right address verification solution for your organization:

1.) Access to high-quality and extensive data

In order for your address verification software to provide you with the maximum ROI, you want to rest assured that your system has the capacity to effectively validate addresses. That’s why it’s important to partner with a company that uses delivery point validation—a system formed by USPS® to ensure an address’s deliverability. It’s also crucial to validify addresses across many different regions, which is why our address verification software checks addresses against postal data from over 240 countries across the globe.

2.) Integration capabilities

When exploring address verification solutions, you want to select an option that integrates seamlessly with the software that is already existent in your CRM and ERP systems. Consider investing in integrated data quality solutions that fit with your company’s existing software to simplify data collection and ensure address accuracy throughout your entire business.

3.) Client testimonials

It’s also worth considering what notable brands and businesses have entrusted a given data management company with their data services and needs. There’s a lot to be said about a data management company that has amounted an extensive array of clients scattered across many different industries. Try exploring a company’s client testimonials to get a feel for what the process looks like from the end user's point of view before diving into your investment.

Experian provides trusted address verification tools that deliver results

At Experian, we believe that data should be at the heart of the decision-making process for every business. That’s why we offer companies just like yours the address validation solutions that foster confidence in your database.

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¹ https://facts.usps.com/total-address-changes/