Address
Standardization API

Now that you’ve got an idea about the need for standardization, let’s discuss how it works.

You can do it in two ways, manually or with an Address Standardization API, which will help you do it automatically.

Do It Yourself (DIY)
To do it manually, you’d need to:

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

Even though it’s a simple and easy going process, you or your team may end up spending hours trying to do it right. Yet, being tedious in nature, it’s prone to errors, which discards the whole point of it.

Hence, on PostGrid, we advise business owners to invest in an automated API that carries out the process within minimal time and does it very accurately.

The address standardization API of PostGrid is PAF certified, which means that all the addresses that we have in our system come directly from the official database of Royal Mail.

Here’s how it standardizes all of the addresses present in your mailing list.

Here’s how it works:

• 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.

After standardization, it’s necessary for you to take one more step and get your data clean or verified. Standardization alone is not the solution to get your direct mails to the right recipient. Parsing and validation are also recommended.

And you don’t need to go somewhere else to get it done; PostGrid provides all three of them in a single package.

• Standardization: To standardize the addresses of your mailing list, the API first parses and then arrange them in the format suggested by Royal Mail. Plus, this way, all of the customer details also become consistent.
• Validation: The next step will ensure that all of your mailing list addresses are valid and deliverable. This is done by verifying them with the official database of Royal Mail. As the data of Royal Mail keeps on updating, it also helps to remove the outdated addresses from your system. Thus, ensuring only high-quality data for your company.
• Deduplication: Once the parsing, standardization, and verification is done, the API also looks for the addresses which are present multiple times in your mailing list. They’re usually the result of retargeting your customers. And when you launch your direct mail marketing campaigns, you end up investing more funds than needed by shipping several mail pieces to a single address and so on. Hence, by removing the duplicate addresses from your system, the API helps you to keep your cost down.