The problem with poor data
Poor address data can lead to many issues, such as costly redeliveries, having to replace items and documents that don’t reach their intended recipient, a poor user experience, and negative online reviews. All of this can have a huge impact on your outgoings – and your overall success.
That’s where address validation and address verification come in. But what’s the difference? Let’s take a look.
What is address validation?
First of all, let’s start by covering what the term address validation means. Address validation is the technology that is used in order to capture and check an address in an online checkout or form. It confirms whether an address actually exists and is mailable by checking an address against data sets – i.e. Royal Mail’s PAF – to ensure it is correct.
Who uses address validation?
Address validation is used by a variety of industries in order to ensure they’re collecting the right address data. You’ll find that many online retailers, insurance companies, and lots of other industries, use address validation tools in their online forms in order to capture correct address data.
Using an address validation solution on your website ensures that a customer’s address is correct, but also enables the customer to enter their address quickly and simply, meaning they purchase your product or service, or get a quote, faster.
This results in a stress-free customer experience, but also means that you have the data you need in order to allow you to get on with what you do best. For retailers, this means sending out orders without a hitch; for insurers, it means having the right data in order to provide the right quote.
What is address verification?
While address validation checks that an address is correct, address verification ensures that the data in your CRM is clean and regularly updated. It also checks for things like standardisation, making sure that addresses are in the correct and same formation in your database.
How does address verification work?
Address verification involves multiple steps that each play an important role in ensuring that an address is right. These steps include parsing, standardising and matching, and together they work to enrich the data in your system to ensure the format is the same for each address, and that there are no errors.
Who uses address verification?
Many businesses choose to verify the addresses in their database as a way to make sure their data is clean and accurate. From online retailers to Fintech and banking, the benefits of address verification are felt across many industries wanting to save money, ensure a good customer experience, and get the most out of opportunities their clean data can provide, such as carefully planned marketing campaigns.
Address validation or address verification – or something extra?
So, now that you have a clearer idea of what address validation and address verification are, which one do you actually need? In reality, a combination of the two is the best way to achieve clean and accurate data, a great UX and a customer base that keeps coming back.
The key is to find a solution that offers exceptional data quality and is easy to use. While there are many address validation providers out there, they are not all equal.
By looking around, you’ll see there are tonnes of address validation and verification providers who all offer roughly the same thing.
But what if you could capture great address data that’s verified against the very best data sets in the market, plus get your hands on a whole load more location details that will skyrocket your capabilities and give your customers the very best experience?
What if you could paint a picture of a customer’s address (e.g. understanding whether it’s an affluent area, whether it often floods, the crime level, etc); create marketing campaigns that directly target customers in a particular area; and continue to target existing or previous customers with specific products or services thanks to a better understanding of their social and economic status? There’s only one solution that will allow you to do all of that and more.
Find out how LANDCLAN will give you so much more than just clean address data, allowing you to maximise your business potential like never before.
