Find the best Address Verification Software

Collecting delivery and mailing addresses of customers is essential for running a successful logistics, ecommerce or research business. Once captured, these addresses are verified to maintain accuracy and ensure smooth business operations.

Although address verification can be done manually, it can be time-consuming and prone to errors. Employing address verification software makes the task simple and efficient by automating the capture of customer addresses and making the data readily available to the stakeholders. Additionally, the software validates the available customer addresses by running automatic checks to ensure smooth deliveries, boost marketing communication, and improve the sales strategies.

Before you purchase address verification software for your business, it is important to understand its features. This buyers guide includes what address verification software is along with its common features, benefits, key considerations, and more.

Here's what we'll cover:

• What is address verification software?
• Common features of address verification software
• What type of buyer are you?
• Benefits of address verification software
• Key considerations when selecting address verification software
• Market trends to understand

What is address verification software?

Address verification software is a tool that verifies and standardizes the customers’ delivery and mailing address list for businesses. The software offers features such as data quality control, geographic maps, and live reports. These features not only speed up tasks, like delivering a product or sending marketing emails, but ensure accuracy of customer information.

Address verification software can be used by both small and midsize businesses and enterprises in ecommerce, logistics, sales and marketing, and others having direct delivery requirements or involved in market research.

Dashboard in Melissa Data Quality Suite Software (Source)

Common features of address verification software

Address Validation	Match the input address against the reference address data to check if it is valid and deliverable, and format it as per the local postal standards.
Autocomplete	Get automatic suggestions to complete the input address based on the software address directory.
Data Cleaning	Clean large volumes of address data that is not required, to maintain accuracy and ensure intelligent decision-making.
Data Quality Control	Address database issues like profiling, cleaning, matching, and monitoring with data quality solutions.
Geolocation	Convert a postal address into geocodes (latitude and longitude coordinates) to place on the map for address mapping and customer tracking.

What type of buyer are you?

While customer details are important for all businesses, those in the following industries might consider address verification software for their business goals:

• Sales and marketing: These businesses need to maintain a customer database with information like address and geographic location to understand and analyze the target market. This further drives their sales and marketing strategies to build a strong network of customers and increase sales.
  Having a fully-featured address verification software can help these businesses in verifying the input address during lead generation, creating better ad experiences based on the customers’ geolocation, and ensuring timely deliveries.
• Ecommerce: Professionals in this industry rely on timely product delivery to ensure a seamless customer experience. This depends on the accuracy of the customer address. As sales are happening over the internet, it is important to build trust among the customers that their order will reach them as promised.
  Address verification software can help ecommerce businesses by providing verified addresses and customer locations to ensure timely deliveries. As the delivery process involves multiple stakeholders, such buyers should opt for software that automatically verifies the address database and collects it in a centralized platform for users to access at any point in time.
• Logistics: Logistic businesses adopt various shipping software solutions to eliminate issues like delay in deliveries or return orders. One such solution can be the address verification software, as it can automate the process of address database management.
  With features like data discovery, cleaning, validation, and more, it can reduce the time and cost utilized for manual data entry. Not only can the software help ensure a clean and consistent address database, but it can also streamline business operations.
• Finance: Address verification is essential for a financial business to mitigate fraud, reduce losses, and identify theft. While this can be manually done, financial businesses look for ways to streamline the process due to a huge customer database.
  Leveraging address verification software can help such businesses by automating the verification process. Additionally, it also eliminates the need to physically visit the customer for verification, which, in turn, helps save time and effort.

Benefits of address verification software

• Enriched database: Address verification software ensures that your database is always up to date. It maintains accuracy with real-time validation and automatically identifies missing address information like postal code, territory, street address, house number, etc. As a result, you get a reliable customer database to perform business operations.
• Increased brand reputation: Customers have a major role to play in the success of a business. With an accurate customer database, you can ensure strategic sales, marketing and timely deliveries. This will help increase customer satisfaction and enhance the presence of your brand in the market.
• Better marketing results: An up-to-date customer database is essential to analyze and improve marketing strategies. It can help you send the right marketing message to potential leads, thereby letting you gauge the effectiveness of your marketing plan and get better results.

Key considerations when selecting address verification software

• Data security: Customer information is sensitive and hence it is your responsibility to not just store it but also keep it safe. Try looking for address verification software that offers data security features in addition to the verification solutions.
• Usability: Not all software users are tech-savvy, making it essential to have an intuitive software interface. This includes having features like a centralized dashboard, shareable excel sheets, and a search bar. Try exploring free trials or demos before buying to check if the software solves the purpose. You can also opt for a training program if available, to ensure its optimum usage.
• Budget: Budget is an important factor to consider, especially in the case of long-term investment. However, you should look for software that is not just budget-friendly but also caters to your business needs. It is a good idea to look for a fully-featured address verification solution that offers monthly, quarterly and annual plans.

Market trends to understand

Here is a recent address verification software market trend that you should be aware of:

• Artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance customer address verification: Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are expected to revolutionize the way customer data is stored and managed by businesses. With AI and ML in place, identity and address verification tools will communicate beyond people, places, and devices. The system will learn and adapt without any human intervention. As a result, businesses will get enhanced, enriched, and accurate data to securely utilize and perform business operations.

Note: The application selected in this guide is an example to show a feature in context and is not intended as an endorsement or recommendation. It has been taken from sources believed to be reliable at the time of publication.