Why Address Verification Is Important To Your Business?

Accurate, updated and validated customer information is essential to any business. Next to personal details, the address is an important piece of information.

Basically, you need the correct address in your company information database to send mail or deliver shipment to its intended recipient in a timely manner. Undelivered correspondences and shipments can result in missed sales opportunities, customer frustration, poor customer loyalty, and unnecessary costs. All of these could negatively impact your business.

While a single returned mail doesn’t seem like a problem, having numerous bounced mail could be detrimental to your business.

What is address verification?

As a business owner, you want to be sure that your mail reaches its destination. This is where address verification or validation proves helpful. With this service, you can maintain an accurate mailing list, so you won’t worry about undelivered mails and its associated problems.

The address validator collects and cleans up your customer addresses. It also ensures that addresses on file are accurate, standardized and current. According to a specialist at Byteplant, this service can be used to verify information collected from different data-gathering tools such as an existing customer database, CMS, website, or call centers.

There are different types of address verification tools, such as:

• drop-down verification: users use a drop-down menu where they can choose their city, state, and country; most popular type of address validation and used by 6 out of 10 US online e-commerce businesses;
• partial verification: users provide their zip code, the tool automatically supplies the city and state, then rest of the information is manually entered;
• post-entry validation: users manually enter their data, a pop up shows suggestions, and then the user chooses their address; and
• type-ahead verification: once users enter their address, the tool suggests accurately addresses saving their time.

What are the benefits of address verification?

The benefits of address verification cannot be underestimated. Let’s check out some of the top reasons why a business should consider investing in it.

1. Improve customer satisfaction

Receiving an erroneous shipment, delayed delivery and undelivered items are among the most common eCommerce customer complaints. In many of these cases, the most common culprit is a typo in the address. With just a simple error in the address, a parcel can travel to a different state and end up in a wrong mailbox.

These mishaps definitely mean an unhappy customer. Chances are, they will unlikely trust your brand in the future.

With address validation, you can prevent formatting errors and typos in your database. You can rest assured that your parcels and mails will be delivered to their intended destinations. This will surely improve customer satisfaction.

2. Minimize returned mail quantity

When you send a mail to a non-existent address, it will just be re-sent back to you. While there’s really no harm to it, the money you spent on mailing cost is wasted. Hundreds of return mails could mean a substantial expense that your business is wasting.

Don’t wait to lose money before you have your customer list validated.

3. Better marketing results

Most businesses use their address list mainly for marketing purposes. If you have an accurate mailing list, you can get your message to more potential leads. And since you are sure that the mails are sent to their intended recipients, you can accurately gauge the effectiveness of the marketing plan. You can tweak your marketing campaign and make it more efficient.

In many cases, the marketing plan and materials are actually good but the mails aren’t getting to their intended recipients. Thinking that your present marketing efforts are ineffective, you might spend on a different path, albeit unnecessarily.

4. Real-time correction of typos

Address verification makes online forms easier. With this tool, customers won’t have to deal with error prompts when they submit the form. Address verification provides real-time check, so users are able to correct the typo instantly.

5. Faster delivery

As mentioned above, troubles with delivery are often due to typos in the address. In most cases, the USPS or courier service will find a hard time locating a recipient with formatting errors; hence, delaying the delivery process.

If the address is correct, the parcel will likely be delivered within the time frame set by the mailing service.

Address verification ensures that all mail and shipments follow the standardized format accepted by mailing services.

6. Increase conversion

At least 7 out of 10 potential customers don’t complete their online purchases because of the long or complicated checkout process. Ecommerce businesses must find ways to limit the steps and time a customer spends when checking out. They are less likely to change their minds if the checkout page is simplified and instantaneous.

Address verification helps consumers by providing auto-complete forms. With this, they only need to manually enter several pieces of information while the rest are automatically supplied in the fields.

7. Avoid unnecessary lost time

Undelivered mail would mean extra work. Instead of focusing on more important tasks, you find your team dealing with returned mails. You will need to figure out why the mail was undelivered, correct the problem, and re-send the parcel. All of these are unnecessary delays and loss of work hours. A validated mailing list can avoid such nuisances.

8. Ensure up-to-date mail list

Regularly updating your mailing list is essential to make sure that your customers get timely services and correspondences. While this can be done manually, it is time-consuming and inefficient.

Address verification software simplifies the process. Through its large database, it can prune out erroneous and invalid addresses – and you can run it regularly to ensure an updated mailing list.

Final thoughts

Maintaining an accurate and updated mailing list can have a tremendous impact on the efficiency, success, and growth of your business. Considering its myriad of benefits, every business should consider it as a worthwhile investment.