Address Correction

What is address correction?

A guide to address correction and how to do it

One minor typo is all it takes for your shiny new air fryer to be delivered to your neighbour or, worse, to the other side of the country. If your friendly neighbour receives it, you’ll just face the embarrassment of knocking on their door and asking for it back. But more often than not, minor address errors mean the delivery is gone for good.

Loqate’s research shows that 80% of failed deliveries are caused by inaccurate address details, and the speed at which data degrades contributes to this. 13% of consumer and 37% of business address records become outdated yearly.

The experience is nothing short of frustrating for customers, but businesses suffer, too. For businesses, using and storing wrong addresses can disrupt operations, damage customer relationships, and result in various unexpected expenses, from reshipping to refunds. Accurate data entry and robust address correction processes are essential to avoid these.

Address correction: the definition

Address correction is the process of correcting inaccurate or incomplete customer addresses in your database. It involves conducting a full audit of your existing data, fixing typos, and reformatting entries so they comply with national address standards. Every country has its reference database. For example, in the US, the USPS Address Management System (AMS) is the official address database; in the UK, that’s the Royal Mail Postcode Address File (PAF).

Businesses often store address data across multiple systems. For instance, your HubSpot account might hold all your customer records for marketing and customer engagement purposes. You may also have the same or even more detailed address data stored in your billing platform or order management system. To scan and correct this information, you need an automated tool that can consolidate all your data and cleanse it in batches.

What is a correct vs an incorrect address?

A correct address is complete, accurate, and structured according to the official postal database of where you’re based. The devil is most definitely in the details here. It should contain no typos, missing house numbers, incorrect postcodes, or inconsistent abbreviations (all the details that postal address correction checks for). Importantly, it must match recognised postal standards so that carriers can process and deliver it without manual intervention.

An incorrect address is any address that deviates even the slightest from these standards. This could be a single wrong digit in the postcode, a misspelled street name, or missing key elements like an apartment number. Even seemingly minor differences, such as using “Rd” instead of “Road” when the database requires the complete spelling, can slow down or stop a delivery altogether.

Benefits of address correction

1. Understanding your customers

Do you really know your customers if you think they are based in Florida but they’re actually from California? And before you raise an eyebrow - this is a realistic scenario. One single digit different from 93101 instead of 33101 sends you from Miami, Florida, all the way to Santa Barbara, California.

Customer segmentation is crucial to delivering effective marketing campaigns that resonate and reach the right people. If you’re leveraging the wrong addresses, your customer segmentation will be completely skewed.

You could be emptying your pockets on paid ads or wasting your marketing team’s time on posts targeting the wrong audience or targeted messaging. By using address correction, you can guarantee that you’re targeting the right audience and streamline and improve the ROI of your marketing campaigns, ensuring that no marketing investment goes to waste.

2. Complying with regulations

Various state and federal laws mandate that businesses store only updated customer data. For example, based on the USPS Move Update, companies that use USPS bulk mailing rates must check and update addresses at least every 95 days against the USPS National Change of Address (NCOA) database.

State-level private laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) or Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act (VCDPA) also require data updates and allow users to request corrections. Industry-specific laws, such as the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLBA) for financial services and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) for healthcare, have similar requirements.

Unsurprisingly, the financial sector has the most stringent laws around accurate customer data to prevent financial crime. Address correction, particularly if automated and using a trustworthy provider, helps you comply with these regulations. It gives you the peace of mind that you’re not risking any non-compliance fines and subsequent damage to your reputation.

3. Saving on remediation costs

There’s a solution for every problem, but it doesn’t mean it will come cheaply. Businesses spend a lot of money redirecting deliveries, refunding customers, and supporting them online if something goes wrong. It’s estimated that returns cost businesses a staggering 66% of the product’s original price. Address correction helps you avoid this web of unexpected and escalating expenses.

4. Improving your operations

We know a business is only as sustainable as its supply chain. So if you want to maintain a consistent revenue stream with consistent (and predictable) costs and flow of goods, you should work to avoid all the potential gaps that lead to unexpected expenses.

Correcting addresses at the source (when users enter their details) and maintaining an updated address database through address cleansing are critical. In the short term, it allows you to reduce delivery failures, optimize your inventory management, and free up some of your customer service team’s time. In the long term, you will see higher productivity in staff and gain more capacity for forecasting and budgeting.

5. Building better customer relationships

Customer relationships are built on the same principles as any other relationships. For it to work, you need to get to know the other person. This includes learning the hard data (like their name, phone number, and address) and the soft data (their needs and goals). So for your customer relationships to be fruitful and sustainable, you should at the very least have their address right.

Having only up-to-date address data means you can deliver your products promptly and seamlessly to the right person, providing a smooth experience to each customer from their first purchase. You can then more easily build trust and cultivate brand loyalty, an invaluable competitive advantage in a market flooded with options.

How to correct an address

Typically, businesses wouldn’t go into their systems, pull out all their address data, and manually review every address for accuracy. Just think of how long this process would take, particularly in large enterprises with hundreds of thousands of customers.

Enterprises should leverage a specialized tool like Loqate to save staff time and resources and ensure the highest possible accuracy. Loqate can connect to your systems via an API (Application Programming Interface) or simply by adding a short code snippet to your website. It also integrates with all the major e-commerce and sales and marketing platforms, from Salesforce to Shopify Plus, and the list continues to grow.

Once connected to your systems, the software instantly gathers all your address data and cross-checks each entry against authoritative address data sources. In the United States, USPS address correction uses the official USPS dataset, the national standard for validating and updating mailing information.

Aside from standard data sources, Loqate also leverages other widely recognised postal reference files to account for real-world variables. For example, it uses UDPRN Append (UK), National Change of Address (NCoA, available in the US), and Mortality screening datasets to flag and correct outdated or invalid resources from individuals who have recently moved or passed away.

It can scan and correct 100 addresses per second and up to 360,000 per hour, depending on the quality of your existing data. Each corrected address comes with detailed metadata, including an Address Verification Code (AVC). This code tells you whether the address was fully verified, partially corrected, or flagged as ambiguous. The result is not just a clean dataset, but one you can measure and trust.

Let’s address the issue of bad address data

Addresses aren’t just a line item on a customer form. Any business with a digital footprint needs this information to be correct and up to date at all times to maintain operational resilience. While it’s never easy to decide to audit all your data and confront the errors and inconsistencies that may surface, ignoring potential gaps does not make them disappear. Quite the opposite, actually. The longer you wait to analyze and resolve your address data gaps, the more they compound over time.

Tools like Loqate are critical for gaining visibility over your address data and solving any data inaccuracies efficiently, quickly, and without significant strain on your human or financial resources. But prevention is just as important as remediation. Aside from correcting your existing data, Loqate also offers an Address Capture tool that plugs into your online forms and offers type-ahead suggestions as customers enter their details. Thanks to this feature, addresses are corrected in real time before they are even submitted.

Ready to clean up your address data? We can help you get started with a free data health check. Sign up here.