101 Ways To Use Address Verification - #1: Deduplication
Deduplication means finding and removing duplicates. Every database or address list in the world has duplicates. If you gather or store addresses, you'll have to deal with it eventually. Many organizations choose to just ignore the duplicates so that they don't have to deal with them until later.
What is a duplicate address? It should be very simple to figure out, right?
100 North Main Street, Anytown CA 90210 = 100 North Main Steet, Anytown CA 90210.
Even a quick glance at these two addresses in a spreadsheet would show that they are duplicates.
However, what happens when the address is typed in differently:
100 N Main Street, Anytown CA 90210
100 North Main Str, Anytown CA 90210
100 N Main ST, Anytown California
100 N Main Street, 90210
100 North Main ST, Anytown 90210
Each one of these is the exact same address but written a little differently. (There are at least 10 more variations of this same address that are valid addresses.) If this address were scattered throughout your address list (or database) you might not ever notice that they are the same. If your list is bigger than 10,000 you might not even want to look through it for duplicates.
If only there were a way to standardize the addresses so that the duplicates could be easily removed. THERE IS! That's one of the ways you can use our USPS address verification software. In fact, the first step in our USPS address verification process is standardization. Our service utilizes the US Postal Service standards for addressing. Thus, each of the example addresses would be standardized to be exactly the same:
100 N MAIN ST ANYTOWN CA 90210
Now, when you put this into a spreadsheet and sort by address it is very easy to see the duplicates. However, you don't have to. Our USPS address verification service automatically marks the duplicate addresses for you and places them in a separate file called "duplicates".
So, you can take your address lists and address databases and use our address verification service to deduplicate them. It only takes a few minutes.