Address Verification Provides Better Customer Communication, Also Saves Trees
The Addresses of prospects and customers are very important. Not only is a correct address required to properly ship a purchased item and to reduce customer service issues, it is also a very important piece of data in terms of ongoing communication with a customer or prospect. For example, the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) estimates over $170 billion is spent on direct marketing annually, communicating brand, new product information, and other account servicing information with a goal of lasting customer relationships.
These marketing and customer communication campaigns of course can have their effectiveness substantially decreased if the individual addresses that serve as the foundation of these campaigns are incomplete or incorrect. To quantify this, the United States Postal Service estimates there will be 6.8 billion mail pieces designated UAA (Undeliverable As Addressed) at a cost of about $2 billion in postage each year. In addition, the USPS also reports that there is something wrong with the address in 25% of all mailed pieces. The potential loss can be pretty significant on the bottom line if address quality is poor within customer and prospect databases.
And the heavy costs aren't limited to wasted postage alone. There is also the cost of wasted print and marketing materials, missed opportunities, and other poor customer service costs as a result of bad address data, all of which can very well be higher than just the cost of postage.
And as companies look for ways to be "greener" and environmentally-conscious, eliminating mass paper waste due to poor address data can score significant points in any of these initiatives, and of course is better for us all at the end of the day.
One way to achieve a substantially higher level of address quality is with StrikeIron's North American Address Verification product that focuses on US & Canada, and also our Global Address Verification offering for the rest of the world which handles addresses in over 200 countries (see the full country list here). Both of these solutions provide an easy-to-integrate Web service API that enables an address to be verified on-the-spot when collected from a Web form, within a business process, or manually entered from a data entry professional.
Here is an example:
Once the call out to our data services is integrated into an application or Web site (usually with a single line of code), that's it forever. We handle all of the ongoing monthly data updates to the master address data files so our customers don't have to worry about the growing and ever-changing address reference files the post office puts out each month.
It's always nice to save a few trees, especially when it's so easy and when there can be a large, positive impact to the bottom line to go along with it.
Once the call out to our data services is integrated into an application or Web site (usually with a single line of code), that's it forever. We handle all of the ongoing monthly data updates to the master address data files so our customers don't have to worry about the growing and ever-changing address reference files the post office puts out each month.
It's always nice to save a few trees, especially when it's so easy and when there can be a large, positive impact to the bottom line to go along with it.