What is Address Cleansing and how does it relate to Address verification software
Address cleansing is the process of ensuring that your address data is up-to-date, accurate and standardized. Once it meets these criteria, the address can then be validated against an official postal authority or database.
This process includes standardizing a postal address to ensure that it follows the correct format for its respective country, as well as fixing any missing or incorrect information.
Address cleansing is essential for effective customer communication and improved mail delivery rates, as well as increased efficiency when it comes to postal operations. Address cleansing is also known as address validation or USPS address verification (for the US market), and can be used to verify a customer’s address during checkout or at any point in the customer journey where their mailing address needs to be confirmed.
Ready to begin cleansing your customer mailing addresses? Getting started is easy, simply install the Address Guard app to your Shopify store and in 30 seconds, our platform will begin to automate the process of validating every order.
Examples of Address Verification Standardization
Looking at the United States market, it’s typical to include both the Zip4 + Zip5 postal codes for address standardization. Address Guard handles this process automatically in addition to auto formatting address components (ex: Road > Rd).
International address data
In other countries, such as Australia the formatting requirements are slightly different – especially for residential buildings where apartments or unit base addresses exist. If the recipient lives in an apartment you would list their number first followed by a slash and a number for the street address.
Example:
- United States: 150 Hay Street , Apt 7
- Australia: 7/150 Hay Street
Comparing these two countries we can see that there are specific formatting rules that must be followed otherwise the package will not be delivered to the correct address. This is why utilizing an address verification service that understands these various formatting requirements is critical for your e-commerce business.
Using algorithms to automate address cleansing
When an e-commerce business is looking to validate a customer’s shipping address, it’s usually handled in a bulk format – meaning downloading the customer orders into an excel file > uploading this into a program and then reuploading the finished file. Cleaning that many addresses at one time is inefficient and not to mention extremely slow. Why not automate this process with a platform that can programmatically standardize address data as the order occurs and then automatically update your platform in real-time?
That’s the beauty of Address Guard, where not only do we clean the address but we also ensure it’s properly formatted for the country in which the package is being mailed. In reality there are various aspects of this process when address correction is needed. Within our address verification platform, we handle this in 3 ways:
- Address Parsing – our platform will break apart each individual component of the address as the address number, name, city name, state name and postal code.
- Address Standardization – each component is then formatted to match the postal requirements of the country (ex: United States apartment formatting Vs Australia that we explored above).
- Address Validation – lastly, we take the standardized address and perform address correction to ensure accurate data is flowing into your store.
Since Address Guard covers 245+ countries and territories you can feel confident that our address validation software can handle your customer data – regardless of location.
Save Time, Money and Team Resources
Now that we’ve established the process of address validation for both US and International addresses, it’s also important to understand the benefits for your business.
Address cleansing is the best way to ensure that your customer’s addresses are accurate and up-to-date, allowing you to build trust with customers while avoiding any delays or errors in communication. Address validation can also save you time and money by reducing costs associated with incorrect addressing of mailings.
Therefore, address cleansing should be an essential part of any organization’s customer communication strategy to ensure that mailings arrive quickly and accurately.
By incorporating address cleansing into your automation workflow with Address Guard, you can maximize the effectiveness of your customer communications while minimizing time, cost, and effort spent on addressing errors.
Common usage issues with address verification software
While Address Guard makes every effort to ensure an mailing address is accurate, there are some situations where a customer may enter an incorrect address where it simply does not exist. When this situation occurs, Address Guard will prompt the customer to ask if the entered street address or other relevant information is indeed accurate – such as a missing apartment number or if an address rule is triggered.
From this website form, the customer can click to update their address. This process is an additional safeguard to ensure accurate location data. Once the address is updated, Address Guard automatically updates the mailing address in Shopify. In addition, a note is added into the Shopify order so that your team is fully aware of any changes to the customer’s mailing address.
Now your team can feel confident that shipments to both US addresses and International addresses will arrive on time ensuring customer satisfaction.
In conclusion, we can say that address validation is an essential tool for any business looking to provide customers with important information via mail or other postal channels. By validating addresses, businesses can ensure that their mail will be delivered quickly and efficiently, improving the overall customer experience.
While there are many tools that exist to boost workflow automation, revenue and customer engagement, at Address Guard we know that address validation is a must-have for any organization looking to maximize the effectiveness of their customer communications. Address validation is an invaluable service that should not be overlooked in any customer experience strategy.
Ready to get started?
To get started with automating your address validation service and to ensure a great customer experience – while reducing costs, simply install Address Guard to your e-commerce store today.
For Shopify ecommerce brands, it’s as simple as viewing the App Store, click to install the app and configure your settings. The whole process takes about 30 seconds to install and another few minutes to configure settings.
We also have a few best practice guides to help your brand ensure address rules, tags and branding are optimized for your shopping needs.
Have a question? Feel free to use the live chat button once logged into your account and your Orlando, FL based team will be happy to help.
