Address Standardization API

Address standardization is essential for your company because you may send your direct mail pieces to the wrong addresses without one. In addition, if the information contained in your mail piece was confidential, it might cause severe problems to your customers and your company’s reputation.

Similarly, if you launch direct mail marketing campaigns regularly, then address standardization can help you prevent misspending. Most of the time, due to retargeting customers and potential clients, companies end up storing the details of the same customers more than once.

Now, this results in sending multiple direct mail pieces to the same customer several times. It cost you money and may irritate your customers as well.

Now that you have an idea why address standardization can be a great addition to your direct mail process, you should know how to do it.
You have two options: to do it yourself and the other one by using an address standardization API.

To do the former, you’d need to follow the following steps:

• Get the addresses you want to standardize.
• Check the spelling, typos, and other errors.
• Edit and correct the abbreviation where needed.

Now, it may seem easy to do, but it might take you tons of hours to complete this process. Plus, manually doing it may cause you to let slip a few errors, which destroys the whole purpose behind it.

The second option is to use an address standardization API like PostGrid.
The API exactly does what’s been done in the previous step. The only difference is that it does it all automatically.

The only task that you’d need to do is integrate it with your system with a few clicks. From there on, it takes charge of the process and completes the whole standardization process on its own.

The postal services of Canada developed a certification program known as SERP. It is simply there to indicate that when a company is SERP certified, it’s using Canada’s official database to verify your addresses.
When you’re sending snail mail through a company that’s SERP certified, then you can send it carefreely. You can send any type of mail pieces through this, viz.,

• Direct Marketing Mails
• License Renewals
• Customer Awards
• The Donation
• Discounts and Offers
• Loyalty Rewards
• Rebate Offers
• Financial Details
• Legal Documents
• Subscription Renewals
• Billing Statements
• The Newsletters
• Political Messages
• Compliance Letters, etc.

To get started with PostGrid, you’d need to integrate the API with your CRM, website, or other tools that you use. Once it’s been integrated, it’ll fetch all of your customers’ details and standardize them.

This is what it’ll do for your mailing list.

• It corrects all the spelling errors, viz., the state, city, or other location names.
• Correct the formatting according to USPS, viz., capitalization.
• Edit and correct the abbreviations as per USPS records.
• Fixes the zip codes to ZIP+4 characters
• Recognizes and highlights the information gaps.

However, for the best results, we highly recommend that you also get an API that can parse and validate your addresses too.

• Standardization: Standardization mainly means to put all of the address details of your customers in a similar format that Canada Postal Service Provider suggests.
• Validation: The verification process is when the PostGrid API checks all of the addresses of your customers for their validity and deliverability. This way, all of your direct mail pieces reach the right recipients.
• Deduplication: The API also removes the identical addresses occurring in the database multiple times while checking. It helps you save the cost of your direct mail marketing.