Ensure a Smarter Tomorrow by Unlocking Efficiency With Your Address Data Today

Virtually every business on the planet captures and stores address information. Ostensibly this data enables you to ship items or send mail to customers and prospects, to correspond with suppliers, and to communicate with a network of distributors or other partners.

But address information provides so much more than that. When you know where your customers live and work, you can glean important information about their income levels, demographic attributes, and lifestyle preferences. You can identify purchasing patterns and lifestyle trends to inform your strategies for expansion to new locations.

Location provides contextual insights about education, taxes, weather events, building construction and usage, business occupancy and foot traffic, emergency services, natural resources, vehicular traffic patterns, and much more.

The average large business in the United States stores over 100 million addresses. That data has the potential to open doors to vast amounts of useful information and insights.

However, it is often difficult to work with addresses. Many abbreviations, changing street names and variants, new construction, and other anomalies result in a confounding lack of standardization. Each country has its own unique format, and linguistic differences such as accented vowels confuse things even more.

Geo Addressing and eCommerce

To illustrate the importance of address accuracy, let’s look at the ecommerce industry. Total ecommerce transactions are expected to exceed $8 trillion globally by 2026, representing 23% of all retail sales. Many of those transactions originate from mobile devices, where data entry can be a bit challenging.

Now consider that an estimated 4% of abandoned shopping carts result from problems entering a delivery address. On top of that, $333 billion of ecommerce transactions end in failed delivery attempts. That includes the rapidly growing hyperlocal delivery business, currently dominated by food orders, but quickly expanding to include other categories.

In many cases, hyperlocal deliveries are handled by nonprofessional drivers with less knowledge of local roads and housing developments. One out of every five such deliveries is either delayed or canceled due to challenges in locating the right address. For small restaurants operating on razor-thin margins, that’s a huge problem. Late deliveries lead to unhappy customers, and canceled orders cost much money.

For Data-Driven Decisions, You Need Address Integrity

Data is the fuel that drives effective business decisions in today’s highly digitized economy. According to analyst firm IDC, 83% of executives want their organizations to be more data-driven. They’re investing heavily, spending an estimated $6.8 trillion on digital transformation in 2023. Forbes reports that 68% of Fortune 1000 companies now have a Chief Data Officer (CDO), an increase of 600% over the past decade.

Most initiatives for 2024 will involve transforming customer experiences, leveraging AI for proven use cases, generating new insight to increase operational efficiencies, and leveraging the power of location to develop innovative solutions to persistent problems. Companies continue shifting to the cloud while focusing on security and compliance.

To optimize these investments, businesses need good data. Contextual richness adds value. For many use cases, addresses don’t necessarily add value in and of themselves. Rather, they serve as a contextual key that opens the door to vast amounts of additional information. This is why the most successful digital transformation initiatives include a programmatic approach like geo addressing. With high-quality addresses, you gain access to so much more.

Best Practices in Address Data Integrity

Leading companies take a programmatic approach to ensuring address integrity, attending to the lifecycle of address data pertaining to their business. Precisely’s geo addressing is comprised of four stages in this lifecycle: address capture (also known as auto complete), address validation, geocoding, and location-based data enrichment.

Let’s look at each of these and explore ways that businesses can improve address data integrity throughout the entire address lifecycle:

• Address capture often relies on a user to enter accurate information. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen. By using autocomplete technology to pre-fill address fields with information that is known to be valid, you can start out on a strong footing.
• Address validation is still important because changes are inevitable. By checking information against the postal service database, for example, you can identify potential address changes (in which a customer moved to a new residence, for example) or changes to street names or numbering schemes. 
• Geocoding involves pinpointing a specific address on the map, that is, determining its precise geographic coordinates. This is an essential step for unlocking the wealth of contextual location-based data associated with each location. Lower-quality geocoding services do not generally pinpoint an exact location. Instead, they calculate an estimated location, which cannot deliver optimal results for data analytics.
• Location-based data enrichment is where organizations can add enormous value to their data, unlocking rich insights about their customers, products, suppliers, competitors, and more.

The key to steps three and four is assigning a unique identifier to each physical address. At Precisely, we call this the PreciselyID. It links any physical location to over 9,000 individual data points including weather and climate, geological attributes such as mineral content, building construction and roofing materials, square footage, tax records, and much more. The PreciselyID opens the door to information about building occupants, including the nature of any businesses located at a specific address, the names of owners or tenants, and much more.

Without a programmatic approach to proactively managing address data integrity, you risk delivery problems, poor analytics, and even opening the door to potential fraud. For the best results, companies should make it easy for customers to enter a valid address, verify the accuracy of address information, identify the sales tax jurisdiction (where applicable), and check that the email address and phone number are in fact linked to the physical address.

To ensure accurate deliveries, companies can use this high-quality address information to provide hyper-accurate delivery locations. This is especially important in the case of multiunit dwellings such as apartment buildings, duplexes, and accessory dwelling units (ADUs).

Marketing teams will benefit greatly from improved address accuracy and location-based data enrichment. They can learn substantially more about existing customers and identify segmented groups of look-alike customers within the target market.

Precisely Geo addressing Creates Business Value

Precisely’s best-in-class geo addressing solutions simplify the address entry process, reduce delivery errors, ensure sales tax compliance, and increase the analytical value of addresses.

We offer curated data for millions of addresses worldwide, with quality, multi-sourced data that we enrich and update routinely. As the global leader in data integrity, Precisely provides confidence, helping companies deliver on their promises to customers with trusted, accurate, contextual information.

Want to learn more about Precisely Geo addressing? Read our eBook The 6 Capabilities You Need in a Geo Addressing Solution.