New 42-day free trial
Smarty

3 ways address normalization can benefit your business

Address normalization art
John Hickey
John Hickey
 • 
January 11, 2023
Tags

We recently released a free ebook, 4 Steps to Unlocking Latent Revenue and Driving ROI with Your Address Data, in which we show you how to use your company’s address data to unlock latent revenue and drive ROI.

In our last article, we reviewed address parsing. Today, we’ll explain address normalization and why it matters for data cleansing and analytics.

Address Normalization (or making an address look normal) is the process of formatting an address so that it matches the proper address format of the national postal authority, such as the USPS for those in the United States. This process is also referred to as address standardization.

Each national postal authority creates its own rules designating casing, punctuations, abbreviations, and proper ordering of address components for shipping purposes. If your idea of a wild Friday night is reading about proper address format, allow us to recommend Publication 28, the 200-page address formatting guideline published by the USPS for the United States. We can neither confirm nor deny that this IS our idea of a wild Friday night. Putting an address into a standard format makes it easier to sort address data and use it for data cleansing and analytics.

Download the 4 Steps to Unlocking Latent Revenue and Driving ROI with Your Address Data ebook

3 business benefits of normalized addresses

Improved lead segmentation

Want to group current or prospective customers based on region, ZIP Code, street, etc? Unnormalized addresses make it hard to do that accurately, resulting in inaccurate lead segmentation.

Reduced shipping errors

If your delivery provider can’t deliver an item to a requested address, you’re either out the cost of the item and its shipping, or you may even have to pay a return fee. Get your deliveries right on the first try, and you’ll reduce costs.

Confidently managed data

Standardizing your address data against an authoritative database like the USPS gives you clean data. You can make strategic business decisions confidently, knowing that your database holds quality data.

One important note: address normalization does NOT guarantee address validity. Address normalization only converts an address into the correct format. Normalization is an important step, but not the only step.

How to normalize addresses

1. Use address normalization/standardization software

Address normalization software will automatically correct messy, inconsistent addresses in a fraction of the time it takes to manually normalize those addresses. If you’re dealing with address lists containing thousands of addresses, you’ll want to automate this task.

2: Manual address normalization

If you only have a handful of addresses or a really bored intern, you can go the manual route. The basic steps required to format most US addresses manually are:

  1. Get the address you want to normalize.
  2. Fix any misspellings.
  3. Check the street name, city, and state. Confirm that all address information is correct.
  4. Correct any abbreviations. a. Just like there’s one ring to rule them all in Lord of the Rings, there’s only one correct way to abbreviate each street suffix, according to the USPS.
  5. Fix the address casing and capitalization.
    a. USPS accepts either UPPERCASE format or Proper Case (text written with each of the first letters of every word capitalized).
  6. Get the ZIP+4
    a. This is optional, but including it could speed up your letter or package delivery by 2 days. Because ZIP+4 Codes apply to only 10-20 delivery points, the Post Office can more easily pinpoint your mail destination with a ZIP+4.
  7. Celebrate because you’ve normalized one address!

Once normalized, you have a complete, correctly formatted address, including the addition of any lost city, state, or Postal Code information. Now, you can move on to validating the address—but that’s a topic for another article.

As you can probably guess, the manual method works best for simple addresses. For high-volume or business use cases, you’ll want the efficiency provided by software. Time is money, after all!

To get the most ROI out of your software choice, look for a CASS-certified software provider, like Smarty.

Developed by the United States Postal Service, CASS address standardization is a certification program for standardization and address verification. CASS-certified software will standardize your mailing lists according to USPS guidelines, update outdated addresses, and verify that the addresses are complete and valid.

Start normalizing and validating addresses with Smarty US Address Verification today, or download our free ebook, 4 Steps to Unlocking Latent Revenue and Driving ROI with Your Address Data, to learn more about how address validation impacts business operations.

Download the free ebook today

Download the 4 Steps to Unlocking Latent Revenue and Driving ROI with Your Address Data ebook

Subscribe to our blog!
Learn more about RSS feeds here.
rss feed icon
Subscribe Now
Read our recent posts
Property data fuels a Smarty-er search for Sasquatch
Arrow Icon
Bigfoot. Sasquatch. Ol’ Filthy Albert. No matter what you call him, you know who we’re talking about: the hairy giant cryptid who haunts our collective imagination and, according to about 13% of the US population, wanders the American wilderness. The traditional perception of Sasquatch is that of a solitary creature whose run-ins with people are the unavoidable consequence of human development and exploration. If recent sightings are any indication, it seems the legendary creature may have more on their mind than just staying hidden.
Ecommerce shipping efficiency tools you need: Address autocomplete and verification
Arrow Icon
We know it’s not New Year's anymore, but we can still push for improvement and efficiency in our lives. Maybe you’ve lapsed on that goal to be healthier or slightly slipped on your new reading and writing regimen. No worries. Not only are we here to remind you to KEEP GOING on whatever goals you have, but we’re also here to give you an easy-to-implement solution that will create shipping efficiency and stop sending packages into the void. I mean, we’re assuming you don’t like wasting money. If you do… that’s how we’re different.
Patient form optimization: The $17.4 million problem
Arrow Icon
Let's start with a number that should make every hospital administrator do a double take: $17. 4 million. That’s how much the average hospital loses annually—just from denied claims due to patient misidentification. This isn’t from equipment costs, not from staffing shortages, and not even from insurance negotiations—just from keeping bad patient data. Surely, our forms aren’t that bad. (Yes, they are, and stop calling me Shirley. )But here’s the reality: According to the 2016 Ponemon Misidentification Report, 30% of hospital claims get denied, and over a third of those denials are caused by inaccurate or incomplete patient information.

Ready to get started?