How to Verify Postal Address

 

When it comes to a business's ability to get paid, getting the address right is a critical component of that process. It can help reduce shipping costs, improve operational efficiency and most importantly enhance customer satisfaction. Incorrect addresses are costly for businesses and their mail carriers. It can also take longer for clients to receive invoices or other important information that will help them manage their finances. Address validation is the solution to all of these issues.

Address validation takes your cleaned and corrected data and compares it to USPS' official database to make sure that the address is valid and deliverable. The process is quick and easy, and it ensures that your mailing lists are complete and ready for delivery.

To start, the address is parsed and standardized to meet USPS formatting rules. This helps to fix minor misspellings that are common in many databases. A good third-party verification software should be able to catch these and alert the user, even without interrupting their workflow.

In addition, the DPV test is run to make sure that the address is a deliverable point. This is especially useful for checking rural routes and identifying hyphenated street names. Alternatively, many third-party verification tools can check a given field against a list of approved city names.

Invalid addresses are often caused by new construction or occupants that have not yet registered with the postal service. Using an address validation tool that follows CASS guidelines (Construction, Address Standardization, and Correction) can help alleviate this problem by ensuring that your data is as clean as possible.