How Address Verification Will Help You This Christmas
After a tumultuous year, Christmas shopping realistically won’t be the same this time around. It’s expected that online shopping and deliveries will be an extremely popular choice for customers this year due to pandemic and the imposed restrictions on retail outlets.
This Christmas may be the first-time many shoppers have purchased items online as a result of the Covid-19 restrictions. This means that online retailers need to be considerate of the shopping experience they’re providing this Christmas.
Address validation is one of the many ways online retailers can help improve the online shopping experience, to make it as seamless and simple as possible.
What is Address Verification?
Address verification (also known as address validation) is the process of checking a postal address against an authoritative database.
If an address does not match any addresses in the database they’re marked as invalid. This means the address either doesn’t exist or isn’t registered with the official postal service.
In Ireland, verifying addresses through the Eircode framework is the best way to ensure deliveries are accurate and undelivered postage is minimised.
Discussed below are some of the ways address verification can help your business navigate through the busy shopping period.
Reducing Cart Abandonment
Shoppers won’t wait around this Christmas. With so many e-commerce home delivery options available this year, cart abandonment will be a major challenge.
A long or complicated checkout often results in the customer abandoning the page. Research indicates that over 77% of filled baskets are abandoned before the customer pays.
With an address verification platform in place on your e-commerce cart page, it’ll allow customers to easily verify their address providing your organisation with an Eircode to ensure accurate delivery.
Overall Better E-Commerce Experience
Late or inaccurate deliveries are some of the most common e-commerce customer complaints. Typos often result in packages being delivered to the wrong address either as a result of the customer themselves or a staff member processing an item incorrectly.
This could leave the customer unhappy with the experience and cautious about buying from you again. With the added panic of Christmas shopping and large quantities of orders, mistakes are often common.
Address verification removes the possibility of a typo or formatting error from impacting the orders processed.
Improved Insights
Gathering high quality data isn’t always an easy task, but with the correct tools and processes in place your organisation can work towards greatly improving this data. An address verification solution in place ensures that the customer data you hold is accurate and up to date.
To get a better understanding of your customers and always make informed decisions, keeping accurate information about them is a must.
Better customer data results in more informed decision making for management, ultimately having an impact on your bottom line in the future.
Save Time & Money
With address verification, there’s less chance of undelivered mailings. This will decrease the pressure on customer service agents at such a busy period, allowing them to focus on more important issues.
As discussed above, better insights and market research can be conducted when addresses are validated due to the improved data. This will save time and costs for marketers and allow management to make timely choices that can benefit from precise and complete databases.
By storing the accurate addresses in your organisation’s databases, wasted communications will also be minimised. This is extremely important prior to sending out marketing communications prior to the Christmas shopping period.
Do you wish to find out more about using address verification and Eircodes to improve your database? Be sure to take a look at DirectAddress, our new web API Eircode and Postcode solution!
