What’s happening in the world of contact data verification? Why is it important? And what should you be looking out for?
When address validation first became a product, the focus was on increasing the effectiveness of direct mail campaigns and ensuring delivery of important account notifications and legal documents. But times have changed and while these are still important reasons for employing an address validation solution, there are now even more reasons and benefits.
Address validation enables eCommerce
With the advent and rapid growth of eCommerce, the capacity of carrier services to deliver packages within a short timespan became stretched and the services offered were too limited to meet all needs.
This created the need for third-party logistics companies and greater use of traditional business carriers, such as UPS and FedEx, for residential deliveries. In turn, these alternatives often charge fees returning undeliverable mail or to correct inaccurate mailing addresses. In recent years, these fees have become substantial, and vendors are turning to address validation to help reduce or avoid such charges.
Originally viewed as a distant competitor for brick-and-mortar retailers, eCommerce has since become a vital component for omnichannel retailers hoping to not only gain business growth from their eCommerce channel but also to drive traffic to their stores via “buy online and pickup in store” and “curbside pickup” options.
Digital acceleration, as evidenced through the growth of eCommerce, has reduced the timescale during which it’s acceptable to verify the accuracy of information, from days or weeks to seconds. You need the correct consumer contact data right now.
Verifying the reliability of consumer contact data regularly used to be entirely adequate. Now, with consumers expecting to be able to make substantial purchases or open accounts online within minutes, the need for real-time validation and authentication has also become important.
The bottom line: Implement an easy-to-use address verification software that quickly identify errors at the point of capture. Make sure the solution can also validate and format stored addresses to meet the standard address format. Not only will the fix and verify an address that a customer enters but you will also see a significant ROI on eCommerce, direct mail campaigns, and more.
Reliable address data results in high ROI
In today’s world, address validation software is even more valuable to digital acceleration. This helps you see higher ROI on eCommerce deliveries and can also be used to better understand who your customers are, even in a digital market.
Address verification is a key component of identity matching—a way to ensure that enrichment data, such as demographic information, credit/income bracket, and lifestyle segment data, is correctly assigned.
Data enrichment gives you a sense of what they really care about. Pair that with the right customer address, you have consumer psychographics and demographics to properly target them through preferred channels, like eCommerce, and deliver a personalized customer experience through marketing efforts.
Of course, having accurate customer data also makes the marketing and eCommerce budget go further for all the reasons we listed above and way more. Here’s an example:
Without accurate customer data—contact and enriched information—special offers designed to acquire new loyalty program members or first-time subscription service users can be taken advantage of by existing customers signing up under different names, family member names, or variations of their own name. A quick check of who’s already signed up at their address can help reduce the occurrence and also make sure that you are targeting your customer base with a message that will resonate.
Reasons why you want address verification
Accurate address data is the foundation of efficient operations and positive customer experiences. As organizations increasingly rely on digital channels, validating addresses at the point of capture helps ensure customer information is correct from the start.
Address verification can help organizations:
- Reduce delivery failures by ensuring packages, statements and important communications reach the intended recipient the first time.
- Lower operational costs by minimizing returned mail, address correction fees and the time spent resolving delivery issues.
- Support a seamless customer experience by preventing delays caused by incorrect or incomplete address information during checkout, registration or account creation.
- Improve marketing performance by ensuring campaigns reach the right audience and reducing wasted spend on undeliverable mail.
- Strengthen customer data quality by standardizing address information and creating more accurate customer records across systems.
- Enable better business decisions by providing reliable location data that supports customer analytics, demand forecasting, territory planning and service optimization.
Without address verification, organizations may experience:
- Increased returned mail and undeliverable shipments.
- Higher shipping and address correction costs.
- Duplicate or incomplete customer records.
- Delayed customer communications and fulfillment.
- Reduced marketing effectiveness due to inaccurate contact data.
- Poor customer experiences that can impact trust and loyalty.
By validating addresses in real time and maintaining accurate records over time, organizations can improve efficiency, reduce unnecessary costs and build a stronger foundation for customer engagement.
How Experian can help
Maintaining accurate address data is essential for improving operational efficiency, reducing delivery issues and creating better customer experiences. Experian’s address verification solutions help organizations validate, standardize and enrich address information at the point of capture and across existing databases.
Whether you’re verifying addresses in real time during online transactions or cleansing large volumes of existing customer records, Experian’s solutions help improve data quality, reduce costly errors and support more reliable business processes.
By ensuring address information is accurate and complete, organizations can streamline deliveries, improve customer communications and make more confident, data-driven decisions.