The Foundations of Postal Verification: Checking Your Mailing List's Addresses

For an address validation to succeed, all required fields must be accurate, including city, state, street number, and lanes. But what precisely is address validation, why is it important, and how is it accomplished? Follow along, and we'll explain how postal validation works, step by step.

The meaning of "Postal Validation."

To validate an address, we look it up in the local post office's database to ensure it exists. Most address validation failures may be attributed to address data that is either:

Insufficient: Some fields, like the one used in the previous example, lack state information.
The inability to verify an address when the area name is misspelled.
Vacant or unregistered addresses are considered non-existent.

Firms lose hundreds of millions of dollars annually due to addressing data errors, which result in returned mail, lost inventory, unhappy customers, and damaged reputations.

However, it's not entirely out of the question to find the owner of an address. The good news is that an address validation program like Email Oversight may help you do all three processes in a streamlined workflow.

Just what is "Address Scrubbing"?

This process might be thought of as the equivalent of a surgeon washing their hands before beginning surgery. Scrubbing is fixing all the mistakes, inconsistencies, and formatting problems in the address data before using it to create a mailing list.

Scrubbing addresses is a time-consuming task that You must not neglect. It's impossible to accomplish by hand; therefore, you'll need a robust address cleaning tool.

Most problems with addresses are systemic. Thus it's important to profile your address book to spot any anomalies. For instance, it is relatively uncommon for a punctuation mark between letters that are not needed, yet this is not detected by spreadsheets or customer relationship management systems. For this reason, you want data profiling to help you spot mistakes in your contact information addresses.

If you want to go further into your address data and find insights you couldn't before, there are 20 other patterns and business rules you may employ.

Now that you know where your data is lacking, you can begin fixing it. This fix is the simple part. You may clean the data by eliminating duplicates, deleting extra spaces, and correcting typos or clerical errors. Using a geographical dictionary, you may even change all the misspelled words to their accurate versions.

Data duplication is likely. Thus you should remove it. It's been years since this information was last updated, and you now have many addresses for the same person or organization. To avoid wasting time and resources evaluating old addresses, it's crucial to deduplicate the whole dataset before beginning the validation process. As soon as you have finished cleaning up the data, you may go on to verify the mailing list.

Overcoming the Difficulty of Address Verification by Understanding It

An address verification program can only check so many addresses. The reliability of your email list relies on your adherence to excellent data quality methods. Examples of these might be:

Errors in the input data shown above often result in human error, which preventative measures may mitigate. You may provide controls like a drop-down menu of available cities to save clients from typing in their complete addresses. Your staff or outside suppliers will need to be educated on the fundamentals of data entry if they put this information in. You'll have an easier time handling the purification phase if you put in the time and effort to minimize input mistakes beforehand.

This is the most complicated component of the address information and the most prone to error. You can only accomplish so much with software. It can repair broken structures, but problems with the context will remain. As a result, the program can't tell whether the user entered the correct zip code but the incorrect street or home number. Some businesses cross-reference this information against a definitive list of physical addresses, often by linking up with a local data supplier with expertise in fraud prevention. Companies like these validate information using primary sources like monthly bills, bank statements, or driver's licenses. However, the USPS verification process eliminates many of these addresses, so that you may skip this step.

Putting Data Quality First: Maintaining high data standards is an ongoing process. You cannot do this in one sitting. The need for mailing lists will never go away, and as long as your company continues to operate, new information will come in daily. Data quality shouldn't be seen as a one-and-done objective. If you are working with transactional data, you will also require a real-time implementation of data cleaning and deduping.