Understanding Address Parsing, Standardization, and Delivery Verification APIs

A key offering that many of our clients appreciate is our trackable direct mail. With a dynamic QR code, we can identify every direct mail recipient who uses their smartphone to open a call-to-action (CTA), whether by dialing a phone number or scheduling an appointment. We can even push an event record for the specific recipient to their customer relationship management system… or contact a sales representative with the activity.

While the return on investment is outstanding, mailing or delivering a physical marketing communication is, of course, more expensive than a digital message. Because of this, we are cautious about data cleanliness. We want one piece per household, never more. And we want every piece delivered to a deliverable address.

Without accurate data, you can cause many issues:

• A frustrated household receives multiple pieces and gets frustrated with both your brand and the waste.
• Unnecessary printing costs for pieces that aren’t delivered, or for multiple pieces delivered to the same address.
• Unnecessary postage costs for pieces that aren’t delivered, or for multiple pieces delivered to the same address.

It’s not a minor issue… without accurate data, you can have incredible waste.

Approximately 20% of addresses entered online contain errors – spelling mistakes, wrong house numbers, incorrect postal codes, formatting errors that don’t comply with a country’s postal regulations. This can result in late or undeliverable shipments, a big and costly concern for companies doing business domestically and across borders.

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Address verification isn’t as easy as it may sound, though. Aside from spelling issues, new addresses are added to the national database of deliverable addresses each week. Some addresses are transformed as buildings change from commercial to residential or single-family to multi-family dwellings, farmland is subdivided into neighborhoods, or entire neighborhoods are redeveloped.

Address Verification Process

• The address is parsed: Household number, address, abbreviations, misspellings, etc., are logically separated.
• The address is standardized: Once parsed, it is reformatted to a standard. This is critical because 123 Main St. and 123 Main Street will then be standardized to 123 Main St, and a duplicate can be matched and removed.
• The address is validated: The standardized address is then matched against a national database to confirm that it actually exists.
• The address is verified: Not all addresses are deliverable, despite their existence. This is one issue that services like Google Maps have… they provide you a valid address, but there may not even be a structure there to deliver to.

What is Address Validation?

Address validation (also known as address verification) is a process that ensures street and postal addresses exist. An address can be verified in one of two ways: upfront, when a user searches for an address that is not correct or complete, or by cleansing, parsing, matching and formatting data in a database against reference postal data.

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Address Verification vs Address Validation (ISO9001 Definition)

Not all address services are the same, though. Many address verification services use rule-based approaches to match against a database. In other words, a service may state that within zip code 98765, there is a Main Street that starts at address 1 and ends at 150. As a result, 123 Main St is a valid household under the logic, but not necessarily a verified address where something can be delivered.

This is also an issue with services that provide a latitude and longitude with a specific address. Many of those systems use math to logically split addresses within a block and return computed latitude and longitude. As retailers, restaurants, and delivery services utilize lat/long for physical delivery, that can cause a ton of issues. A driver may be halfway down the block and unable to locate you based on approximate data.

Capturing Address Data

I’m working with a delivery service right now where consumers enter their own address information, the company exports deliveries daily, and then routes them through a different service. Every day, dozens of undeliverable addresses must be corrected in the system. This is a waste of time, given there are systems that can manage this.

As we optimize the system, we’re standardizing and verifying addresses upon entry. That’s the best way to ensure your data cleanliness. Present the standardized, verified delivery address to the consumer upon entry and have them confirm it’s correct.

There are a couple of standards that you’ll want to see that the platforms use:

• CASS Certification (United States): The Coding Accuracy Support System (CASS) enables the United States Postal Service (USPS) to evaluate the accuracy of software that corrects and matches street addresses. CASS certification is offered to all mailers, service bureaus, and software vendors that would like the USPS to evaluate the quality of their address-matching software and improve the accuracy of their ZIP+4, carrier route, and five-digit coding.
• SERP Certification (Canada): The Software Evaluation and Recognition Program is a postal certification issued by Canada Post. It aims to evaluate the ability of specific software to validate and correct mailing addresses. 

Address Verification APIs

As I mentioned above, not all address verification services are created equal – so you’ll want to really keep an eye on any issues that may arise. Saving a few pennies on a free or cheap service can cause you dollars in downstream delivery issues.

Melissa is currently offering free address validation services for six months (up to 100K records per month) to qualifying essential organizations working to support communities during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Here are the more popular APIs for address verification. You’ll notice that one popular platform isn’t mentioned – Google Maps API. That’s because it’s not an address verification service; it’s a geocoding service. While it standardizes and returns latitude and longitude, it doesn’t mean that the response is a deliverable, physical address.

• Easypost: US address verification and fast-growing international address verification.
• Experian: Address verification for over 240 countries and territories across the globe. 
• Lob: With data from over 240 countries around the world, Lob verifies both domestic and international addresses.
• Loqate: Address verification solution that will capture, parse, standardize, verify, cleanse, and format address data for over 245 countries and territories.
• Melissa: Verifies addresses for 240+ countries and territories at the point of entry and in batch to ensure only valid billing and shipping addresses are captured and used in your systems.
• SmartSoft DQ: Offers standalone products, address validation APIs and toolkits that will easily integrate into your existing address-dependent applications.
• Smarty: Has a US street address API, Zip Code API, Autocomplete API, and other tools to integrate into your applications.
• TomTom: TomTom Online Search’s geocoding request feature provides an easy-to-use solution for cleaning address data and building a geocoded location database.