Postal address database

Definition:

A postal address database is a contact database that contains street address information about a client, customer, or other contact.

A postal address database helps companies organize and format their contact information. Maintaining a mailing address database is extremely important for organizations that do any type of mailing to customers or other contacts. In order to maintain a clean and accurate database, a company can implement either front-end or back-end address verification software.

A front-end solution will verify a postal address at the point of entry (i.e. a call center, point of sale, etc.). By ensuring that the address being entered is USPS® validated upon entry, companies can greatly reduce their future contact database maintenance and cleansing.

A back-end solution will verify existing contact information in a postal address database. This is an extremely useful tool to implement in order to clean address information that has been stored in a database for some time.

By ensuring that a postal address database is up to date and accurate, companies can:

• Reduce amounts of returned mail
• Reduce manual database cleansing efforts
• Increase delivery rates
• Ensure a correctly formatted and organized database

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Learn more about Experian Data Quality's address validation solutions.