Whether it’s delivering an online order, assessing insurance premiums or providing emergency services, having the correct address is vital to providing good service. Your customers are well aware of the significance of sharing correct and complete street addresses.
Yet, you should not assume that an address shared with you is correct. 60% of consumers intentionally submit incorrect information in online forms.
Sometimes, it’s an honest typographic error. At other times, it could be a fraudster using a fake address to avoid paying for goods. In either case, using bad addresses could cost you. According to a recent report, returned mail can cost businesses as much as $20 million each year!
Implementing address verification checks is the easiest way to avoid such losses. Backed by 30+ years of experience, Melissa is a leading name in global address validation and verification. G2 users ranked Melissa #1 for Address Verification in 2024.
What is Melissa Address Validation?
Melissa Global Address Validation is a powerful tool to help you keep your data clean.
To verify addresses, Melissa's Address Verification solution compares the address entered by a customer with postal reference sources. To provide wide global coverage, Melissa partners with numerous premier postal agencies including USPS, Royal Post, Canada Post, LaPoste and Australia Post to name a few.
Along with verifying an address to be deliverable, it is also capable of standardizing country specific mailing formats, updating street names and enriching the address with any missing information.
We can currently verify addresses in 246 countries and territories. Our transliteration engine supports 8 languages and writing systems. Addresses written in any of these languages can be transliterated into Latin characters.
How does Melissa Address Validation work?
Melissa Address Validation offers a quick and reliable address check at the point of entry to ensure that only verified, complete, standardized and unique addresses enter the database. It is a single interface through which businesses can verify all international addresses by comparing the addresses entered by customers against reference data sourced from authoritative third-party databases.
While results are declared in seconds, there are a number of background processes that contribute to generating clean, deliverable postal addresses.
Step 1: The tool captures all address details entered in web forms. Alternatively, the type-ahead autocomplete function may be leveraged to reduce the number of user clicks required and ensure good data enters the system.
Step 2: It uses proprietary rules and lexicons to extract the different individual address components.
Step 3: The individual address components are restructured according to standardized or local country formats.
Step 4: The Melissa Address Validation tool uses reliable, in-country reference datasets to confirm that the address exists. Verification takes this check a step further by ensuring that the address is deliverable.
Step 5: Addresses entered in foreign characters are transliterated to Latin characters.
Step 6: The validated address is returned in a format ready for mailing. For additional benefits, Melissa Address Validation tools can also convert street addresses to precise latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates.
With thorough checks, the Melissa Address Validation tool can prevent misspellings, complete abbreviations, add missing information and more to ensure that every address in your mailing list is correct and deliverable.
The Melissa USP
The Melissa Address Validation tool has continually evolved. While it isn’t the only address verification tool available in the market, it stands out from its competitors. Our years of working with street addresses from around the world have not only helped finetune the extraction and verification algorithms but also provided rich insights into human's perspectives on addresses.
Today, our tool is able to capture address details from diverse global address formats. For example, in the UK, the city name and postcode are written on separate lines while in Australia, these details are mentioned on the same line.
Melissa’s address verification tool can extract address components from both cases and convert them to a standardized format. Similarly, years of experience have made it easy to identify data quality issues for street addresses such as words that are commonly misspelled or outdated details.
Another quality that makes the Melissa Address Validation tool stand out is the ease of navigating through the tool’s interface. There’s a short learning curve to using the tool and no special skills are required. The same API can be used for web forms and data entry points across a business enterprise to maintain an even data quality standard and user experience.
Why do you need Melissa Address Validation?
Leveraging Melissa Address Validation to clean up your mailing lists has multiple benefits.
Firstly, it ensures your customer profiles have valid, deliverable addresses. For e-commerce platforms, this implies a significantly lower chance of returns. Similarly, for insurance companies, this means an accurate assessment of risks and insurance premiums.
By getting a more dependable view of customer profiles, companies can tailor their products and services to meet expectations. Your customers are happier with the overall experience. A recent survey found that 69% of respondents are less likely to shop with a brand if their order isn’t delivered on time.
In addition to improving customer satisfaction rates, address validation also helps optimize costs. Lower return rates and the reduced need to re-ship orders help save money, especially on bulk mailing operations.
Lastly, there’s the impact it has on the day-to-day administration. The Melissa Address Validation automates address verification to eliminate manual address checks. It’s quicker and has no risk of being affected by human biases.
Is Melissa Address Validation right for your business?
Having a verified customer postal addresses is vital for businesses in all sectors. Integrating the Melissa Address Validation tool with your data entry systems makes it easier to maintain clean databases. In turn, this puts you in a position to make the best use of your resources and deliver exceptional customer service.
Whether your business caters to the local folks in town or an international audience, Melissa is the perfect fit for your data quality strategies. To experience the benefits for yourself, reach out to us today.
Melissa can help.
If you believe contact data validation could benefit your business, reach out to our team of data quality experts for a no-obligation discussion. We'll explore how our solutions can drive your business forward. Fill out the form to get started.